Category: speculative fiction
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The most useful, beautiful, and dangerous of humanity’s inventions
Over in the Adjacent Possible, Rick Liebling interviewed me about writing Bandwidth:
…Planes are computers we fly in. Stoves are computers we cook on. Buildings are computers we inhabit. Nearly every manufactured object has a chip in it,
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Refracting Reality Into Rainbows of Possibility
I interviewed Monica Byrne about writing The Actual Star, an epic tale of self-discovery that spans millennia and questions the very meaning of civilization. Born of extensive research into Maya history and culture, this wildly ambitious speculative adventure will …
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Heroes Are Whoever’s Left When Everyone Else Runs Away
I interviewed Andy Weir about writing Project Hail Mary.
Project Hail Mary follows an unlikely astronaut on a desperate mission to save the solar system from a spacefaring bacteria that eats sunlight. It’s an immensely entertaining adventure that will …
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Ten popular Bandwidth highlights, annotated
A while back, Goodreads asked me to annotate ten of the most popular Kindle highlights in Bandwidth. I love snatching glimpses into other people’s creative processes, and these notes give you a sneak peek into mine.
Let’s dive right …
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Blake Crouch on writing Summer Frost
Blake Crouch’s Summer Frost is a technothriller in miniature. Only 74 pages long, it conjures a complete, compelling narrative arc through a near-future where a non-player character in a computer game evolves into an autonomous AI. As thought-provoking as it …
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Can speculative fiction teach us anything in a world this crazy?
Danny Crichton interviewed me for TechCrunch about the feedback loop between imagined worlds and the real one:
…Current events are a painful reminder that unlike fiction, reality needn’t be plausible. The world is complex and even the wisest of us
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Silence
Turn it off.
The feed was the information infrastructure that empowered nearly every human activity and on which nearly every human activity relied. A talisman that lent mere mortals the power of demigods. Doctors used it for diagnosis. Brokers used …
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Paul McAuley on writing Anthropocene fiction
Paul McAuley’s Austral is a gorgeous, haunting novel—brimming with fractal stories-within-stories—about a fugitive on the run through the backcountry of the new nation established on a greening Antarctica. McAuley’s unskimmably precise prose conjure the bleak beauty of the internal and -
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