Category: science fiction

• Veil

  Veil is a character-driven science-fiction thriller set in a near-future where someone has hijacked the climate. Diplomats, hackers, scientists, spies, journalists, and billionaires grapple with the power and consequences of technology, life in the Anthropocene, and what it means to find a sense of agency in a world spinning out of control. August Cole calls…

• What If a Tech CEO Tried to Save the World With Geoengineering?

  OneZero just published an exclusive excerpt from my new novel (warning: minor spoilers): As the climate crisis grows increasingly dire, a radical question is appearing on more politicians’ lips: What if we geoengineer our way out of the mess? The notion that we could reduce global temperatures with a sweeping technical fix and for relatively…

• Kim Stanley Robinson on how we live in a science fiction novel that we’re writing together

  From The Coronavirus is Rewriting Our Imaginations: These events, and others like them, are easier to imagine now than they were back in January, when they were the stuff of dystopian science fiction. But science fiction is the realism of our time. The sense that we are all now stuck in a science-fiction novel that…

• The promises and perils of geoengineering

  I went on the Technotopia podcast to talk to John Biggs about geoengineering, the future of climate change, and the inspirations behind my forthcoming novel, Veil. Complement with my conversation with Andrew Liptak about Veil, how it feels to write fiction, and this podcast interview about how technology shapes society. This blog exists thanks to…

• Announcing Veil

  I have a new novel coming out May 20th, 2020. Veil is a character-driven speculative thriller about a near-future shaped by geoengineering: When her mother dies in a heat wave that kills twenty million, Zia León abandons a promising diplomatic career to lead humanitarian aid missions to regions ravaged by drought, wildfires, and sea level…

• Oliver Morton on science journalism and humanity’s fascination with the moon

  I interviewed Oliver Morton about science writing, the relationship between science and science fiction, and the creative process behind his latest book, The Moon: In World War II, two of the signature technologies of science fiction came about in real life, in part because of people who were science fiction fans: the superweapon and the…

• Why companies are hiring sci-fi writers to imagine the future

  Katie Underwood interviewed me for a Pivot Magazine feature on how business leaders are commissioning science fiction that challenges them to think differently about the future: In recent years, major multi-national companies like Nike, Google, Apple, Ford and Visa, and governmental bodies like NATO and the French army, have all enlisted the services of sci-fi…

• How CEOs are using sci-fi to imagine the future

  Susan Lahey wrote up a wonderful feature for Zendesk Relate on a SXSW panel I participated in last year alongside Malka Older, Kevin Bankston, and Tim Fernholz: In the 2002 movie Minority Report, the main character walks through a store where artificial intelligence customer service devices greet him by name, ask how he liked recent…

• William Gibson on tracking reality’s Fuckedness Quotient

  I interviewed William Gibson about tracking reality’s Fuckedness Quotient, how to avoid terminal shortsightedness, and the creative process behind his new novel, Agency: I think I’ve learned that we need, individually, to find those areas in our lives where we do possess agency, and attempt to use it appropriately. And it seems to me that’s…

• Ted Chiang on the most interesting aspect of time travel

  Past and future are the same, and we cannot change either, only know them more fully. My journey to the past had changed nothing, but what I had learned had changed everything, and I understood that it could not have been otherwise. If our lives are tales that Allah tells, then we are the audience…