Category: speculative fiction

• 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, and we deploy sensors to make everything that isn’t already a computer machine-readable. In doing so, we…

• 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 challenge you to reframe the past, present, and future. Monica is also the author of The…

• 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 teach you more real science than you learned in high school. Never has a novel so…

• 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 in. The highlights from the novel are indented and my notes follow. There was a deeper…

• 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 is propulsive, this is a story that will suck you in and stick with you long after…

• 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 understand only a tiny sliver of what’s really going on. Nobody knows what comes next.…

• 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 it to place bets. Physicists used it to explore the mysteries of quantum entanglement. Farmers…

• 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 external landscapes the protagonist navigates as she tries to find her way in a world where…

• 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…