fromearthtothestars

Q&A With Kevin J. Anderson & Rick Wilber

Kevin J. Anderson and Rick Wilber discuss the follow-up story to their Asimov’s Reader’s Award-winning novelette, “The Hind.” Don’t miss “The Death of the Hind” in our [November/December issue, on sale now!]

Asimov’s Editor: You two seem to make quite a team for these generation-ship stories. Did you have “The Death of the Hind” in mind when you wrote that award-winning first story, “The Hind”?
Kevin J. Anderson & Rick Wilber: Yes, we aimed all along at future installments. We really enjoyed working together on “The Hind,” and the story as we told it had room for at least one more installment, since the ship was traveling under control again at the end of that story and we wanted to see where both the story and the ship would wind up. But the great reception of “The Hind,” winning the Asimov’s Readers’ Award for novelette and then later winning a Canopus Award for best interstellar fiction—short form, was certainly a motivator for us to press on and complete the second story.

AE: The very nature of a generation ship story is that, over time, we meet new characters as a new generation takes over. You’ve kept some of the main characters from the first story in this second installment, but brought us some new ones, too. Tell us about these new characters.
KJA&RW: Right at the start of “The Death of the Hind” we meet Dothan, who’s our protagonist in this story. Dothan plays an important role in this sequel as a fine pilot and the calm voice of reason when disagreements arise. Readers first met Dothan as Kym’s infant in the final paragraphs of “The Hind.” Kym was the hero of that story so it’s fitting that her daughter, a talented and strong adult now, is the hero of the new story. There are villains, too, in the new story and they connect to the first story, as well, so there’s a nice through-line there. We wanted “The Death of the Hind” to stand alone for those encountering these characters and their troubles for the first time so we slipped in the backstory here and there to bring those readers up to speed. We think it’s pretty effective at that.

AE: Speaking of through-lines, when you blogged on the writing of “The Hind,” you two mentioned that it began as a conversation during a long drive through the Rocky Mountains. Did you map out this second story then, or is there another drive involved in this second story?
KJA&RW: There was another drive! Just as in “The Hind,” we were both teaching at the annual Residency for grad students and faculty of the Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Western Colorado University. Rick teaches in MFA program in Genre Fiction there and Kevin is Director of the Publishing Program. As usual, Rick flew from Florida, where he lives at nearly sea level, to Colorado Springs a day early to acclimate and the two of us then drove the next day over to Gunnison, Colorado at 7800 feet, where the Western campus is, to start our parts of the residency. We roomed together at an AirBnb there and had a lot of great conversations, of course. But the bulk of the story was planned out during the drive to Gunnison and then really came alive when Kevin took a mountain hike one afternoon and dictated the story’s first draft during that hike. He handed that off to Rick who, a couple of months later, came back with a more polished version that was quite a bit longer, and after a bit more back and forth we submitted to Asimov’s. Happily, it won acceptance and now it’s in the current issue, to our delight.

First of all, we want to write entertaining and informative story. But it’s true that science fiction often offers a fresh perspective on contemporary social issues, and these stories have certainly done some of that.

AE: You’ve taken on some interesting issues in these stories, from ageism and dementia in “The Hind,” to the importance of the intellectually disabled and the denialism of the truth by some factions in “The Death of the Hind.” Are these things that matter to you both?
KJA&RW: Sure. First of all, we want to write entertaining and informative story. But it’s true that science fiction often offers a fresh perspective on contemporary social issues, and these stories have certainly done some of that. In “The Hind” it was Sudio, an elderly woman suffering from dementia, who recalled the singular key that unlocked the computer to save the day for everyone. In “The Death of the Hind,” we see some of the generation ship’s struggles through the eyes of a young boy named Lonnie who has Down syndrome. It’s Lonnie who ultimately provides a certain moral clarity in the story. Rick is the parent of an adult son with Down syndrome and often includes characters with Down syndrome in his stories. We felt that Lonnie, the son of our hero Dothan, had an important role to play in the story.

AE: What’s next for these characters and their outpost on a distant planet?
KJA&RW: We’re at work now on the third story, which has to do with issues of colonialism and survival and aliens and innocence, revolving around our Down syndrome character Lonnie and his contact with beings who’ve come to this planet to recover their own lost colony, only to discover that Earth colonists have arrived there, too. We think it’s a lot of fun and has some important things to say.

AE: And is there more to come after that?
KJA&RW: Who knows? We’re having fun with it and there’ll be a low-residency stay next summer, too, so we’ll see what happens!

Kevin J. Anderson is the author of numerous SF and fantasy novels including the Saga of Seven Suns, the Wake the Dragon trilogy, his humorous detective series featuring Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I., his steampunk Clockwork Angels trilogy (co-written with legendary Rush drummer Neil Peart), and over twenty novels set in the Dune universe with Brian Herbert. He has won or been nominated for the Nebula, Hugo, Bram Stoker, Shamus, and many other awards. Rick Wilber, an Asimov’s regular, is an award-winning writer, editor, and college professor with a half-dozen novels and short-story collections, more than seventy short stories (many of them first published in Asimov’s) as well as two-dozen poems, five anthologies, and five college textbooks on writing and the mass media. He is co-founder with Sheila Williams of the Dell Magazines Award for Undergraduate Excellence in SF and Fantasy Writing, which is now accepting submissions for its thirtieth-year celebration at http://www.dellaward.com.

Return to Mars

by Paul McAuley

Paul McAuley returns to the pages of Asimov’s with “Blade and Bone,” featured in our [November/December issue, on sale now!] In this essay, he discusses how the desolate landscapes of Mars and the American West have inspired his fiction.

Where do writers get their ideas?

Four years ago, I re-visited one of my favourite places in America: the high Californian desert, and what is now Joshua Tree National Park. The location for some of Hollywood’s classic Westerns, it’s unlike any European landscape. “An aridity that drives out the artificial scruples of culture, a silence that exists nowhere else,” as Jean Baudrillard observed in America. Almost Martian, in its inhuman sublime.

I’ve visited Mars before, too, in novels and stories. First, in the science fantasy mode, in Red Dust, and some years later, closer to realism, in middle part of The Secret of Life, where characters follow actual waypoints on maps got up from orbital images. “Blade and Bone” combines the two modes. Several of the places mentioned are actual Martian locations, as in The Secret of Life, although the terrain has been altered by the impact of spent cores of comets used to aid the terraforming of the red planet. And just as cowboys ride herd on yaks across ancient Martian sea beds in Red Dust, “Blade and Bone” references the kind of Westerns, like Bud Boetticher’s Comanche Station and Scott Cooper’s Hostiles, in which a hard-bitten, flawed hero guides people through landscapes haunted by hostile inhabitants or, as Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff, by their own delusions. The story’s landscapes are similarly hostile, haunted by old wars and unspent grudges of a thousand years of contested history that are dwarfed by the vast uncaring Martian sublime.

“Blade and Bone” is also a Quiet War story, sharing the same future time line as four novels and a fistful of stories. The series ranges across much of the solar system, but apart from a couple of pieces of flash fiction, this is the first long-form Quiet War story I’ve set Mars. It features one of the series’ signature tropes, artificial vacuum organisms which somewhat resemble giant lichens, and like lichens can grow and utilise native resources in hostile habitats, and also enlarges an idea raised in Evening’s Empires, the fourth and last novel: if current or near future billionaires can extend their lives by downloading simulations of their minds, what role might they play in the further reaches of the future? Finally, it borrows from one of the pieces of flash fiction the Samurai-like Knights of Cydonia: the bone and blade which are the story’s contested prize have been stolen from one of their tombs. The roots of its story, as its protagonists discover, go way back.

Paul McAuley’s latest novel, Beyond the Burn Line, which is an exploration of our legacy in a post-human, post-Anthropocene Earth, was one of the Guardian’s books of the year, and shortlisted for the Kitschies’ Red Tentacle Award. Of “Blade and Bone” he says, “This isn’t my first trip to Mars. One of my early novels, Red Dust, was set on a version of Mars under Chinese hegemony and Gollancz recently reissued my near future bio-thriller about the contamination of life on Earth by life on Mars.” This new novella is a deep-future outcrop of his

Quiet War series of novels and shorter fictions: a story about lives shaped by stories that trace an unexpected journey across the battle-scarred face of the Red Planet.

Q&A With Dean Whitlock

After a 34-year absence, we’re thrilled to welcome back Dean Whitlock to the pages of Asimov’s Science Fiction. Get to know him in our latest author Q&A, where we discuss his favorite themes, his advice to new writers, and how an old blueberry garden helped inspire “Deep Blue Jump,” his latest novella, which appears in our [September/October issue, on sale now!]

Asimov’s Editor: What is the story behind this piece?
Dean Whitlock: Thirty-three years ago, we bought a house that came with four large blueberry bushes out back, bushes that turned out to yield a huge harvest of large, wonderfully flavorful berries. Every summer from mid July into August, we would pick blueberries almost every day, enough to put on cereal and ice cream, to make muffins, pies, cakes, and pancakes, to make several jars of jelly and blueberry sauce, and to freeze a dozen or two quarts for wintertime eating.
Picking the berries turned into a meditative experience. I could let my mind roam, and it often roamed over the act of picking (when was a berry perfectly ripe, how could you tell?) and the microecology of the blueberry bushes (the tiny flies, bees, and white spiders, the birds looking for ways in, the chipmunks that sometimes burrowed around the roots).
After a few years, it was only natural to start coming up with various what-ifs that might be used in a story, and the fauna were certainly in there early (usually as boogey beasts that only came out at night), but the pickers were always first and foremost—who were they, why were they picking, who was in charge? Still, nothing coalesced for a long, long time. Finally, current events related to my day job wormed their way into the what-ifs. One of my clients was a substance abuse prevention coalition, so the opiate epidemic and the movement to legalize cannabis were impossible to ignore. Coincidentally, one of my work acquaintances was a lobbyist working on the issue of human trafficking (yes, even in li’l old Vermont). It is a sad truth that addiction and human trafficking are deeply connected in several ways. These were the pieces that gave life and structure to my daydreaming and led to “Deep Blue Jump.”

AE: Do current events feature in all of your writing?
DW: No, though they are certainly present in many of my stories and some of my novels. Ironically, the recent revelations about child labor in the U.S. came out at least a year after I began writing “Deep Blue Jump” and weren’t a part of its creation, but they certainly add a dark resonance when reading it now. “Roadkill” (Asimov’s SF, Nov. 1987) took a fantastical look at dead fur-bearing animals on the sides of our local roads in the context of the green movement and PETA. On the other hand, “Iridescence” (Asimov’s SF, Jan. 1989) was inspired by a fantastic but real bubble act I saw at Circus Smirkus (the best youth circus in the country, if not the world). The burned out human cop and the two aliens are what made the bubble what-if work, not any current events of the time.

AE: What is your history with Asimovs?
DW: If you ignore the early rejections, my history with Asmiov’s began in 1987, when then editor Gardner Dozois selected my very first published story to include in his fifth annual best-of-the-year collection. That story (“The Million-Dollar Wound”) had appeared in the January issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, but my story “Roadkill” was published in Asimov’s that November. Two other stories appeared in Asimov’s in the next two years, but most of my short works have been published elsewhere (mostly due to matters of timing or topic or rejection, plain and simple). In the ’90s, I began to work on novel-length projects, so there weren’t any short works to submit anywhere. Last year, I brought out Iridescent Dreams, a collection of my 20 best stories, which includes the three that were published in the Asimov’s (andis most of my published short oeuvre anyway). I blush to admit that “Deep Blue Jump” is the first of my stories to appear in Asimov’s since 1989, and finally came to fruition a year too late to be in the collection.

AE: Who or what are your greatest influences and inspirations?
DW: I have admired the work of many authors over the years, but I can point to only a few as “greatest influences.” Very early on there was Dr. Seuss, particularly On Beyond Zebra, a book that is not only creative but about being creative. Books like this made me an avid reader for life. In the realm of “almost science fiction,” there was Kurt Vonnegut, whose wry, cynical outlook was perfect for my teen years, but SF&F has always been my favorite genre, and there I would name Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, Ursula Le Guin, JRR Tolkien, Harlan Ellison, Sherri Tepper, and Connie Willis.

AE: Are there any themes that you find yourself returning to throughout your writing? If yes, what and why?
DW: Themes of friendship, family, loyalty, expectation versus will, duty versus dedication. Relationships are the core of most of my stories, long or short, serious or funny, though the type of relationship and its effects are not always inherent in the inspirational ideas or themes. We humans are gregarious animals, as are most of the alien and fantastical species we imagine for our stories. Companionship is essential to a full life. Conflict, or at least tension, is essential to a good story. Love can bring delight or tragedy and often something complex, enlivened with elements of both. Whatever the theme, it’s the people who get across the point.

AE: What inspired you to start writing?
DW: I have always read voraciously. My penmanship has only gotten worse, but I grasped the ways of grammar early and easily and have always been good at producing prose. I talk a lot, too, and enjoy acting a great deal, so I had all the necessary skills built in. I don’t remember the precise reason why, but I started my first storybook when I was about 10. It never made it past chapter one. What I lacked was discipline; there were so many other interesting things to do. I didn’t complete a story until I was 17 (got an A+), didn’t sell one until my late 20s (to a semipro zine that folded the month before my story would have appeared), and didn’t see one published until I was 36. During that time, I’d been a lab technician, a shipping clerk, carpenter, a journalist, and finally a technical writer who wrote marketing copy too, and was starting to develop the discipline that writing fiction requires.

Companionship is essential to a full life. Conflict, or at least tension, is essential to a good story.

AE: What other projects are you currently working on?
DW: I not normally disposed to writing sequels (new world always beckon!), but I’m collecting thoughts for a sequel to my latest novel, The Bell Cannon Affair. The Steampunk tropes, ocean liner setting, and broad cast of characters are simply too fun to set aside. I’m also working on expanding a space-opera-based-on-fairy-tale idea I had back in the 1990s but have never been able to develop and am helping a close friend self publish a Space Opera series of his own. That and the occasional article for a local magazine publisher are more than enough to keep me very busy. (Indie author/publisher is one heck of a lot of work!)

AE: If you could choose one SFnal universe to live in, what universe would it be, and why?
DW: I don’t do “choose only one” questions well, if only because I’m not the same person every year, or even every day. When I was 13, I would have said Barsoom, the Mars of John Carter. At 18, I would have said Middle Earth: the Shire, the ridings of Rohan, the glory of Gondor—wow! Now I’m more inclined to say Discworld, for its insanely comical cosmological illogic, or (to satisfy the SFnal requirement and be more likely to survive) the intriguing worlds of Becky Chambers’s Wayfarers series. It seems like a place where you could live an interesting life with interesting people (human and alien) that wasn’t constantly on the brink of doom.

AE: What are you reading right now?
DW: The latest Neal Stephenson novel, with the latest Martha Welles Murderbot installment on order at our local library. And I just finished an interesting non-fiction book titled Hedy’s Folly, about movie star Hedy Lamarr and her alto ego of inventor during WWII. “Tortilla Flat” by day and non-jammable remote radio control systems for torpedos by night? Who’d have imagined?

AE: Do you have any advice for up-and-coming writers?
DW: There are countless books and blogs full of advice, but here’s one aspect of authoring that I think is too often overlooked: the sound of good prose.
Read your work out loud as you write and listen to it carefully. If you stumble over a word or phrase, rewrite so no other reader will stumble. If it sounds flat, rewrite more life into it. If you have to stop and reread in order to understand what you meant, rewrite to make it clear. If all your characters sound like Han Solo, create new voices. If you keep hearing the same words or rhythm over and over, rewrite from a broader dictionary with a more varied grammatical structure. If you don’t get what I mean, read one of your favorite award-winning books out loud. Then read your own prose. Rewrite so your spoken text sounds just as smooth, interesting, and lively.

AE: How can our readers follow you and your writing? (IE: Social media handles, website URL . . .)
DW: I generally keep my website up to date with news, and occasionally put up one of my short works to provide an entertaining break to the day. You can find links to my books on the major online book vendors too. (www.deanwhitlock.com) I have a personal page on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/dean.whitlock.58) and always post book news there, though I’m an infrequent poster otherwise. (No FB author page yet, but I’d consider setting one up if I detect a lot of interest.) I sell my books in person at the annual Vermont SF&F Expo (usually the final weekend in April), the annual Vermont Renaissance Faire (always the next to last weekend in June), and the hopefully annual Vermont Steampunk Festival (November 11 & 12 this year). And you can feel free to contact me at boatman@deanwhitlock.com.

Dean Whitlock’s first professional sale, “The Million-Dollar Wound,” was included in Gardner Dozois’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Fifth Annual Collection. His last appearance in this magazine, “Iridescence” (January 1989), was a finalist for our Readers’ Award. Since then, Dean has published six novels (Finn’s Clock won First Place in the young adult category for the 7th Annual Writers Digest Self-Published Ebook Awards), along with several other well-received short works released here and abroad. His latest book is Iridescent Dreams, 20 tales of Science Fiction and Fantasy. It includes, he says, “every worthwhile story I had written.”

Q&A With Ali Trotta

Ali Trotta is a poet, editor, and hater of bad coffee who believes in the power of knowing yourself. Learn more about Trotta in this Q&A, and read her latest poem, “When the Mirror Shows Frankenstein’s Monster,” in our [September/October issue, on sale now!]

Asimov’s Editor: What is the story behind this piece?
Ali Trotta: We are all a patchwork of those we loved before, in myriad ways. Sometimes, we are the monster in one way or another. But there is also something about love that’s transformative, renewing.

AE: How did this story germinate? Was there a spark of inspiration, or did it come to you slowly?
AT: This was a poem I wrote very fast. It doesn’t always happen that way. But this one had a mind of its own, as the best ones often do.

AE: How did the title for this piece come to you?
AT: It’s about recognition—seeing who we are and seeing what someone has made us into, real or imagined. (None of us are without scars, after all.) That imperfect or messy, we’re still worth loving in the end.

AE: Who or what are your greatest influences and inspirations?
AT: Ted Hughes poetry changed my life—especially his later works. Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea is a masterclass. Maria Dahvana Headley is one of the most incredible creatives out there. Neil Gaiman’s writing always leaves me in awe, but I’ll always have a soft spot for his poem, “Instructions.” And although not literary, my mother (for her love of reading and her infectious laughter, which I miss) and my dad (for his unfailing support and for being the smartest person I know).

We are all a patchwork of those we loved before, in myriad ways. Sometimes, we are the monster in one way or another. But there is also something about love that’s transformative, renewing.

AE: How much or little do current events impact your writing?
AT: Often! It’s impossible to live in the world and not be affected by it. One of my poems previously published in Uncanny is called “The Persecution of Witches,” and it’s absolutely about how society treats/punished women, which is not unlike what happened during the Salem Witch Trials.

AE: Are there any themes that you find yourself returning to throughout your writing? If yes, what and why?
AT: The power in believing in yourself, in knowing yourself. The way love can be an unstoppable force, for better or worse. The idea that we sometimes haunt each other in some way. And as for why, well, I think these are truths and things others can relate to.

AE: What is your process?
AT: It depends! Sometimes, I’ll draft a poem in one sitting. Sometimes, I’ll rewrite and poke at the same piece for days. I often start in the wrong place and delete opening lines. Once, right before sending a piece out of submission—literally while drafting the email—I had an idea on how to change the ending. I did it, sent it in a few minutes later, and it was accepted for publication.

AE: What are you reading right now?
AT: Kat Howard’s A Sleight of Shadows, which is stellar.

AE: Do you have any advice for up-and-coming writers?
AT: Write and read widely. Give yourself time to refill the well, too. It is hard to create when you’re burnt out, and the world is a mess. So, it’s even more important these days to replenish. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. But learn. Follow other writers on social media, and you’ll learn a lot. Trust me.

AE: What is something we should know about you that we haven’t thought to ask?
AT: My favorite visual artist, right now, is Shannon Stamey. He’s a traditional illustrator, and I am absolutely gobsmacked by his work at every turn. Oh and never give me weak coffee. It’s just burnt water with sadness, and I will assume you don’t like me.

AE: How can our readers follow you and your writing? (IE: Social media handles, website URL)
AT: Bluesky is where I am primarily these days (alwayscoffee.bsky.social), but I’m also on Twitter (the website formerly known as Twitter?) as alwayscoffee and Instagram as alwayscoffee7. (Are you sensing a theme?) I have a TinyLetter that goes out weekly (tinyletter.com/alwayscoffee) and a blog that I really should update (wordpress.com/alwayscoffee). And if you’re looking for more of my writing, here is a handy link: linktr.ee/alwayscoffee.

Ali Trotta is a poet, editor, word-nerd, and unapologetic coffee addict. Her poetry has been published in Uncanny, Asimov’s, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Small Wonders, Fireside, Strange Horizons, Cicada, Nightmare, Mermaids Monthly, The Best of Uncanny Magazine (Subterranean Press), and several of the Rhysling Anthology compilations. Four of her poems were Rhysling Award nominees. Her short fiction has appeared in Curtains, a flash fiction anthology. When she’s not writing, she’s usually cooking, baking, or hugging an animal. She has a German Shepherd named Cash and a rescue cat named Thor, who is part Maine Coon and part Gremlin.

Q&A With David Erik Nelson

David Erik Nelson discusses his latest story while answering questions about his inspirations, his history with our magazine, and the science fictional predictions he’d like to see stop coming true. Read “The Dead Letter Office” in our [September/October issue, on sale now!]

Asimov’s Editor: What is the story behind this piece?
David Erik Nelson: I tend to think of new story ideas while on vacation with my wife and kids, often while driving. On one particular winter break I came up with two. One was about a woman who, upon meeting her fiancée’s family (avid deer hunters, like her own single father), abruptly realizes that the thing she thought was “venison” all her life most definitely was not.
The other story was this one, which was really no more than the working title: “Children’s Letters to Satan.” I asked my wife and kids (a grade-schooler and high-schooler) which I should write first, and they chose “Children’s Letters to Satan.”

AE: Is this story part of a larger universe?
DEN: Sort of. It’s probably more accurate to say it’s anchored in a sort of “private mythology” based on Jewish theology, folktales, Kabbalah, topology, and n-dimensional physics. Other stories in this same mythos include “This Place is Best Shunned” (available from Tor.com) and my short novel There Was a Crooked Man, He Flipped a Crooked House.

AE: Do you particularly relate to any of the characters in this story?
DEN: Yeah. I particularly identify with both the protagonist (Patrice) and her friend (LeCharles). That might seem odd, as they are very different—in race, gender, attitude, where they are in their lives—but they’ve both survived similar trauma, and arrived at very different places. I think that’s sort of reflective of how I personally struggle with what the appropriate moral response is to people who do Very Bad Things™.

AE: What is your history with Asimov’s?
DEN: My first major sale was to Asimov’s, a short steampunk story titled “The Bold Explorer in the Place Beyond.” This was back in the days of paper submissions, and I recently found the acceptance letter from Sheila Williams, which I love. It only runs about three sentences, and two of them read as follows:

“There is much that I absolutely love about this story, but I can’t get myself past Dickie drinking the alcohol off the mud and turds etc. I wouldn’t mind looking at slightly toned down version, but, whatever you decide to do, I am very much looking forward to seeing your next story.”

I kinda feel like that’s my writing career in a nutshell.

AE: What inspired you to start writing?
DEN: I don’t know about what inspired me to start, but I know two things that made me keep with it, even though it’s often hard:
One was that, when I was a kid, working on a story was extremely soothing. The activity of typing on my old off-brand IBM “clicky” keyboard was by itself hypnotic, and that helped. But more importantly, after I was done writing for the day, my head would feel clear and orderly. Writing was the first form of self-medication I ever discovered.
Second was in high school, after I finally submitted a story to my high school’s literary magazine. They published it, and I discovered a fundamental truth: if I wrote stories and published them, then girls I didn’t even know would want to talk to me. I wasn’t a cool kid, and I was an increasingly anxious and troubled one by that time. Meanwhile, the kind of girls who wanted to talk to you because they read a story like this one, those were definitely the kind of people I wanted to be around.
And so here we are.

Writing was the first form of self-medication I ever discovered.

AE: How much or little do current events impact your writing?
DEN: An awful lot, frankly. I think that’s sorta obvious in this particular story (which is pretty clearly set around 2020, and namechecks pandemic measures, civil unrest, and the whole rest of the American mess of that period). But even when they aren’t right on the surface, current events are usually exerting a powerful gravitational pull on my work. A lot of what is happening in the world is scary, and a lot of how I come to grips with scary things is through scary stories.

AE: What other projects are you currently working on?
DEN: I’m currently in the midst of revising a cosmic horror novel titled The Giftschrank. Although it’s not directly connected to this story, they do share thematic elements and that same “private mythology” (let’s call it “The Cantorian Judeo-Cthuloid Mythos”).

AE: What SFnal prediction would you like to see come true?
DEN: I have no clue. At this point, I’d sorta love it if William Gibson’s predictions stopped coming true. No offense, because I love Gibson as a human and adore his writing, but why did he have to be the guy who was spot on? Why couldn’t we get a fun future with Mr. Fusion-powered cars, ‘80s nostalgia restaurants, and everyone wearing double-neckties?

AE: What are you reading right now?
DEN: I just finished The Premonitions Bureau: A True Account of Death Foretold by Sam Knight, which is a fun nonfiction book about the intersection of psychology/psychiatry and ESP in the 1960s and the brief life of the British Premonitions Bureau.
On the fiction side, I’m in the middle of Victor LaValle’s latest horror novel, Lone Women (a historical set in the American West about a lone Black farmer and her Mysteriously Heavy Trunk leaving her predominantly Black farming community in California to homestead in Montana). I absolutely love LaValle (first got hooked by his Ballad of Black Tom), and this is shaping up to be his best book yet.

AE: Do you have any advice for up-and-coming writers?
DEN: It’s trite, but seriously: write every day, read every day. Every successful writer I know writes every day, and every writer I’ve ever known or heard of who’s tried to buck this advice eventually comes around to doing it. (Incidentally, that includes me: I didn’t think I need to read everyday and write everyday, either—you know, because I’m so damn special and different and artistically unique. *sighs* 🤦‍♀️)
Buck up: it’s the 21^st Century. Everyone you see every day has immediate access to all the best writing in human history. If they’re going to read your story, it has to be because they have reason to think doing so will be a better experience then re-reading whatever it is they already know and love. You’ve got to give them something that Atwood, Austin, Butler, Dickenson, Hughes, King, Shakespeare, Yeats—whoever—doesn’t.
Elite athletes train every day. Ballet dancers—even the “nobodies” in the chorus—practice every day. If you wanna be in the show, you’d better do likewise.

AE: How can our readers follow you and your writing? (IE: Social media handles, website URL . . .)
DEN: I can be found online at www.dave0.com (where you can read more of my work in the Free Fiction section: https://www.dave0.com/FreeFiction/ ). If you sign up for my newsletter ( http://eepurl.com/IZckf ), you’ll gets a heads up about new work, as well as some exclusive stories. I get my social media fix on Mastodon (https://a2mi.social/@dave0), and am always happy to kibbitz with new folks there.

David Erik Nelson is an award-winning Jewish author from the Rustbelt Midwest. Over the past 20 years his stories have appeared in Tor.com, Asimov’s, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The New Voices of Science Fiction, Best Horror Of The Year, and elsewhere. He’s written two DIY books, several hundred reference articles, almost a dozen textbooks, at least a million words of technical and commercial copy, and the short novels There Was a Crooked Man, He Flipped a Crooked House and There Was No Sound of Thunder (available in Autumn 2023). Find him online at dave0.com

Q&A With Kofi Nyameye

Kofi Nyameye is a writer and evangelist from Accra, Ghana, and his writing often explores different aspects of human nature. His latest work for Asimov’s presents a unique twist to an old Bible story. Read “The Pit of Babel” in our [September/October issue, on sale now!]

Asimov’s Editor: What is the story behind this piece?
Kofi Nyameye: “The Pit of Babel” started out as an idea I wrote down in one of my journals around seven or eight years ago. The working title at the time was “Dig,” and it was originally going to follow the last remnants of humanity digging a giant pit to the center of the earth for some reason or other. I thought it’d be cool to jump from character to character and chronicle the infighting and sabotage that would inevitably happen.
So I wrote the idea down and then completely forgot about it for several years, but then . . .

AE: How did this story germinate? Was there a spark of inspiration, or did it come to you slowly?
KN: . . . one day I was reading the Bible and I came across the story of the Tower of Babel, and I remembered the idea I’d had several years before. I asked myself what would happen if instead of building a tower to Heaven, mankind built a tunnel into Hell? What would happen if I completely turned that story on its head? And it just built itself from there.

AE: Do you particularly relate to any of the characters in this story?
KN: I don’t know if I’d say I relate to him, but I absolutely love the character of Lucifer. (And okay, maybe I relate to him just a little bit.)
I’m a Christian and an evangelist, so you wouldn’t think I’d say that about the devil, but this is one of the few times that a character has shown up in a story and just absolutely taken over the whole thing. I particularly loved exploring his pride. Look, the Bible’s been written, right? From a Christian point of view, you’d think the devil would know by now that he loses in the end. So why does he continue to do it? That was interesting to dive into.

AE: Are there any themes that you find yourself returning to throughout your writing? If yes, what and why?
KN: My answer to this question changes, depending on where I am in my life and my creativity. Right now if you pushed me for an answer, I’d say “human nature.” A lot of the stories I’m writing right now are in a way trying to answer the question “Why are we the way we are? Why do we do what we do in spite of overwhelming evidence that it is a bad idea?”

AE: How much or little do current events impact your writing?
KN: Almost never. I’ve tried. It comes out sounding false and forced. Most of those stories, I never finish.

AE: What is your process?
KN: I always start with a first draft that’s overlong and quite meandering. I sit down with an idea, and the first draft is me discovering for myself what kind of story fits the idea. Mind you, that doesn’t mean the draft I’ve written is that story. It’s just how I discover what the story should be.
In the second draft, I rewrite the whole thing and come out with a story that makes sense and has all its logic, character arcs, etc. in order.
Then I do like four to five drafts after that where I edit and tweak till the story flows as smoothly as I can get it to. Then at that point I just have to let it go.

I feel like as a species we would be wise to slow down a little, instead of speeding up even more.

AE: How do you deal with writers’ block?
KN: Ha! I’m still working on it. I’m trying to learn to keep showing up anyway.
Talking through the block with a couple (trusted) storyteller friends also helps.

AE: If you could choose one SFnal universe to live in, what universe would it be, and why?
KN: I only just read Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky earlier this year, and I feel like Kern’s World would be fun to live on for a bit. Not sure about staying permanently, though.

AE: What SFnal prediction would you like to see come true?
KN: Almost none of them. Maybe space travel. Aside from that, almost none of them. I feel like as a species we would be wise to slow down a little, instead of speeding up even more.

AE: What are you reading right now?
KN: Atomic Habits, by James Clear. I know, I know: took me long enough. But here’s the thing: I’ve been dealing with a deep depression for the past couple of years, and it really slowed down my writing to the point of pretty much stopping it entirely. This book’s helping me get back into the consistency of writing and just showing up for my life in general.
Honestly, it feels really good. And isn’t that just a great place to end this?

Kofi Nyameye is a writer, evangelist, and unrepentant digital hermit. His work has appeared in Asimov’s, The Manchester Review, Science Fiction World, and the Best of World SF: Volume 1 anthology, edited by Lavie Tidhar. He lives in Accra, Ghana.

Q&A With Lisa Goldstein

We spoke to Lisa Goldstein about her lengthy writing background and delved into a number of other topics along the way, including her love of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea universe, and why she enjoys writing about magic in the real world. Read her latest Asimov’s story,”In the Fox’s House,” in our [September/October issue, on sale now!]

Asimov’s Editor: How did this story germinate? Was there a spark of inspiration, or did it come to you slowly?
Lisa Goldstein: The story started when a friend of mine told me about videos online that showed foxes jumping on trampolines in people’s backyards. Foxes can be tricky or untrustworthy in the old tales, so I wondered what those foxes were up to.

AE: What is your history with Asimov’s?
LG: I’ve sold stories to Asimov’s nearly from the beginning, to Shawna McCarthy, Gardner Dozois, and now to Sheila Williams. All of them knew a lot about editing and gave me great feedback. If any of them rejected a story I was pretty sure there was something wrong with it, and I’d continue working on it or, sometimes, put it away to look at later.

AE: Are there any themes that you find yourself returning to throughout your writing? If yes, what and why?
LG: I like to write stories about magic in the real world, where there’s a possibility of something astonishing or mysterious just around the corner, in a place you’ve passed a hundred times before. And I like showing what happens when the borders between the two worlds become blurred, and what that does to the main character, if it frightens them or changes them or makes them understand something important.

AE: How do you deal with writer’s block?
LG: Not easily. I once read a piece of advice to writers that helps every so often: Pretend you are writing a letter to an author you admire, explaining your problem and asking for solutions. Of course you will never send this letter; instead it’s a way of putting yourself into the mindset of someone who has solved the kind of difficulty you find yourself in. Once I was having trouble with the plot of a novel and I addressed a letter to Nancy Kress, someone who I think is brilliant at plotting. A long time later I told her what I’d done and she said, “Well, you owe me a letter now!” The letter was long gone, though, and it was so filled with despairing cries for help that I could never show it to anyone.

AE: How did you break into writing?
LG: I wrote a short story, and a friend of mine told me I should turn it into a novel. So I wrote the novel, which became my first book, The Red Magician. I sold it to the second editor I sent it to, Ellen Kushner, who was at Pocket Books at the time.
Beginning writers usually hate this story because it seemed so easy for me. I want to assure them that my career was just as rocky as most people’s. For example, after writing a novel I couldn’t figure out how to write a short story for a long time.

I like to write stories about magic in the real world, where there’s a possibility of something astonishing or mysterious just around the corner, in a place you’ve passed a hundred times before.

AE: What inspired you to start writing?
LG: I can’t remember when I started wanting to be a writer. Maybe it was when I read my first book. Creating an entire world out of your head seemed the coolest thing anyone could possibly do. It turned out to be a lot harder than I thought, though. When I was in college I took a summer between classes to do nothing but write, and I went stir-crazy. Did people really lock themselves in their rooms with only a piece of paper for company? (This was before computers.) But after a while I started to like it.

AE: If you could choose one SFnal universe to live in, what universe would it be, and why?
LG: Two choices, at opposite ends of the spectrum: I’d like to live on one of the islands in Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea. Not only would there be the possibility of seeing dragons and wizards and magic, there’s also daily life, which in Tehanu seemed slow but fulfilling: herding goats and spinning their fleece, planting and growing crops, visiting your neighbors, telling stories by the fire, and every so often consulting with the local witch about the weather or an illness. My other choice is about as far away as you can get from that, Iain Banks’s Culture, a technological utopia where AIs fulfill most of your needs, there are amazing scientific breakthroughs, and you’re free to do whatever you want, including exploring other planets and societies.

AE: What are you reading right now?
LG: I’m amazed by the number of terrific women writers working today: Tamsyn Muir, Arkady Martine, Ann Leckie, Rebecca Roanhorse, R. F. Kuang, T. Kingfisher. There’s a lot more of them than when I started reading sf, so I’m spoiled for choice. I’ve also been reading Adrian Tchaikovsky. It took me a while to pick up one of his books because of two words—“giant spiders”—but I like what I’ve read so far.

AE: Do you have any advice for up-and-coming writers?
LG: To start with, there are no shortcuts. You have to sit down every weekday to write, even if you’re blocked. Read pretty much everything and study how an author pulls off something particularly brilliant or, conversely, figure out why the story you just read is particularly terrible. Imitate the good ones until you understand more about style, then stop imitating. Write about things that excite you or anger you or scare you instead of just following a trend or writing for a market. Write the stories you feel need to be told, the stories only you can tell. Have fun—if you’re bored, the reader can tell. Oh, and get an agent.

AE: What other careers have you had, and how have they affected your writing?
LG: I’ve worked in bookstores a lot. It hasn’t helped my writing that much, except for allowing me to get books at a discount, which let me read widely in a lot of genres and research topics I was interested in. Also, people who work in bookstores are usually quirky and idiosyncratic, and know an impressive amount about weird subjects.
I’ve also taught at Clarion and other places. It sounds like a cliche, but I learned about as much from the students as I taught them.

AE: How can our readers follow you and your writing? (IE: Social media handles, website URL . . .)
LG: Website: brazenhussies.net/goldstein
Blog: lisa_goldstein.dreamwidth.org

Lisa Goldstein’s latest novel is Ivory Apples, from Tachyon Press. Her other novels include The Red Magician, which won the American Book Award for Best Paperback, and The Uncertain Places, which won the Mythopoeic Award. She has also won the Sidewise Award for her short story “Paradise Is a Walled Garden.” Her stories have appeared in Ms., Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and The Year’s Best Fantasy, among other places, and her novels and short stories have been finalists for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards.

Q&A With Robert Reed

Check our interview with Robert Reed, an author who is no stranger to our pages. Here we discuss his writing history, his relationship with Asimov’s, and how he came up with the title of his latest story, “What>We>Will>Never>Be,” which you can read in our [July/August issue, on sale now!]

Asimov’s Editor: How did the title for this piece come to you?
Robert Reed: “Excavations” was my working title. The story existed for years as an empty folder on my Google Docs cloud—one of those maybe-projects that the author wants to get to eventually, but not today. The general idea was that an alien gentleman lived alone inside an unusual apartment. I didn’t know why he was alone or what made his home valuable, but one of the Great Ship’s rulers wanted to acquire that property for themself. And that ruler happened to be an !eech, which is why this could be a compelling tale.
The Great Ship is the linchpin of my professional life. Marrow and The Well of Stars are two novels about the world-sized starship, written more than two decades ago and both still in print. The Well ends with the !eech taking control of the mangled Ship, and “Excavations” was to occur hundreds or thousands of years later. I didn’t yet know how much later, and for that matter, I had no idea what an !eech was or what they might want with a harum-scarum’s abode.
Infinite sagas are exactly that. Boundless. The Great Ship will never be fully explored, and the multitudes living onboard will largely remain unnamed and unappreciated. But I did eventually figure out the !eech, at least well enough to write about them. In early 2022, I began three Great Ship novellas, each attempting to cover events just before and a little while after the !eech takeover. “Excavations” was the title for the first two drafts, and while a lot of work remained—most of the plot and action sequences weren’t obvious to me—the two habitats had very respectable names. “What>We>Will>Never>Be” was a typographical nightmare to produce on command. But it so perfectly fits the mood that I was trying for, familiar words bracketed what might be greater-than signs. Though I suspect that a more thorough translation would be more elaborate and beautiful than what weak little English can manage.

Twenty thousand word stories are probably my strong suit. Which helps and hurts. It helps because I can solve my writing problems without having to pound together a string of 100,000 word books. But it hurts because there were never many novella markets when I was starting in this business, and the situation has only gotten more dire. I’ve sold two of the novellas that I wrote last year. One way or another, the third story will be published, if in a slightly smaller form. But I’m well aware that when I do make a sale, a younger author loses their place in the table of contents.

AE: What is your history with Asimov’s?
RR: I have a long, enjoyable relationship with the magazine. More than thirty years, which includes several Hugo nominations and one Hugo win—for a novella, of course. “A Billion Eves.”

AE: What other projects are you currently working on?
RR: I consider myself semi-retired. Yet most mornings are spent working on something. For instance, last week and next week, and maybe until the end June, 2023, I’m building a series of collections to put up on Kindle. The first volume will be called The Esteemed and Strange Love. “The Esteemed” is another Reed novella first published in Asimov’s. It’s wrapped around a Ted Talk that I’ll never give, the 15 minutes where I name and define the five grave threats to civilization on the Earth, and perhaps to intelligence across the universe. The Strange Love portion will contain R. Reed stories about nukes running amok and other civilization-ending wars. Winter Dies is global warming. Polishing the Seed are my gene-engineering tales. Uncannies refers to the “uncanny valley” phrase that I keep seeing on the Web. You know, about AIs. And finally, two volumes about ETs that are with us and removed from us. About Us and On the Brink of That Bright New World.
By my count, I’ll republish around 700,000 words in five epub editions.
Which is probably not even one-fifth of my lifetime output.

“What>We>Will>Never>Be” was a typographical nightmare to produce on command. But it so perfectly fits the mood that I was trying for, familiar words bracketed what might be greater-than signs. Though I suspect that a more thorough translation would be more elaborate and beautiful than what weak little English can manage.

AE: Do you have any advice for up-and-coming authors?”
RR: First: “Up-and-coming” is a cliche, and it’s also a warning. All these years, and I feel like an “up-and-coming” writer. I’m always trying to prove myself, if only to myself. When I can’t do this anymore, I will retire, and the world will likely be a better place for my refusal to string words together.
Second, on the topic of stringing words together. Let’s mention large language models. Which aren’t AIs, but that doesn’t keep them from being profound and unsettling. Their sudden appearance in the public mind is one more proof that we live inside a science fiction universe. But this is a shared universe populated with many up-and-coming authors, each genius wanting to raise the stakes with every new work. Nukes. Climate change. Pandemics and UABs. Who knows what comes next? I sure don’t. But I have strong doubts that writing will survive long in its current form. I halfway expect Amazon to eventually fire all of its human authors, including me, employing large language models that have read and mastered the millions of works already available on the Kindle platform. This won’t happen tomorrow. Probably not. But eventually, there will be meetings with coffee and doughnuts, and teams will be assembled to plan this kind of apocalypse.
And my third attempt at advice: I was a youngster in my twenties, and I hadn’t sold shit. Writing meant a typewriter and ribbons, and in the earliest days, carbon paper to make your only copy. My brother came to visit, and I showed him what I was doing with my evenings. On a board covered with hexagons, I was the Wehrmacht invading the Soviet Union, and I was the Siberian reinforcements defending Moscow from the Nazis. Both at once, and it was great fun.
My brother, who was never shy about offering advice, suggested that I stop playing games and spend more time writing. But that’s a deeply mistaken attitude common to nonwriters. I was in the throes of something huge, imagining two great forces clashing on an epic landscape. In that case, it was the Germans and the Russians. How do they move, how do they survive? And my main goal? I wanted to find the best possible outcome, which was both sides being exhausted and useless, allowing room for something a little better to come into the world.

Robert Reed is a prolific, Hugo Award-winning science fiction author whose work appears regularly in Asimov’s and F&SF. He is from Nebraska and holds a Bachelor of Science degree in biology.

Q&A With Stephen Case

Get to know author and historian Stephen Case in this insightful interview that touches on space opera, good writing habits, and taking advice from Stephen King and Ursula K. LeGuin. Don’t miss Case’s latest Asimov’s story, “Sisters of the Lattice,” in our [July/August issue, on sale now!]

Asimov’s Editor: What is the story behind this piece?
Stephen Case: I’ve always loved space opera. I wanted to play with a galaxy-spanning narrative and wondered if I could capture an epic feel in a short story. I’m also fascinated by religious orders and how their members’ vows shape their lives. I wanted to explore that in a science fiction setting, somewhat along the lines of Marie Doria Russel’s The Sparrow.

AE: How did this story germinate? Was there a spark of inspiration, or did it come to you slowly?
SC: “Sisters of the Lattice” had a germination period significantly longer than most of my stories. I wrote an early draft pre-pandemic, which grew into a novel draft, which ultimately didn’t go anywhere. I ended up almost completely re-writing the original for this final version. It got taken apart and put back together several times, but I kept coming back to images of the sisters, the Lattice, and their planet of ice.

AE: Is this story part of a larger universe, or is it stand-alone?
SC: There’s more to tell. I’ve finished a story set on the Decalogue during the years of the Long Retreat, and hopefully readers will get a chance to see it soon.

AE: How much or little do current events impact your writing?
SC: At least consciously, I would say they don’t impact it much. It was a bit surreal, however, to be working on this piece as the COVID pandemic got underway. I was in the early phases of revision as everything was shutting down, which definitely lent poignancy to working through a story of the galaxy gradually going dark and planets being isolated from each other.

AE: What is your process?
SC: I tend to do most of my drafting longhand. My job has me at a screen most of the day, so I prefer to write first drafts of stories in notebooks. Usually I write in the mornings and evenings, with most revision happening in the mornings before I go to work. Writing longhand means the additional step of transcribing, but that becomes the first iteration of editing. I usually go through a piece four or five times before sending to markets.

AE: What other projects are you currently working on?
SC: My fiction usually comes in bursts; I just finished a few short stories, one of which is forthcoming in Clarkesworld. My larger projects at the moment are non-fiction: I’m revising a manuscript for a book about the nineteenth-century British polymath John Herschel that I wrote for University of Pittsburgh Press, and for the past year I’ve been working as co-editor for Cambridge University Press on the Cambridge Companion to John Herschel. An article I wrote on Herschel and why he’s so important is due out in the June issue of Physics Today.

AE: What are you reading right now?
SC: I just finished Shaun Bythell’s The Diary of a Bookseller and the two volumes that followed and couldn’t put them down. If you’re cranky and love books, I highly recommend.

AE: Do you have any advice for up-and-coming writers?
SC: Read and write a lot. Read some books on writing as well. Stephen King and Ursula LeGuin are particularly helpful.

AE: What other careers have you had, and how have they affected your writing?
SC: A writing mentor told me early on to find a career that could support the writing habit. I would add to that advice to make that a career that involves writing, if possible. I was writing my dissertation at the same time that I wrote my first novel, and almost every day I’m working on a book chapter, review, or article for my “real” job. As best as I can tell, this doesn’t exhaust the writing faculties but rather strengthens them. And teaching (I teach physics and astronomy) forces me think about how to explain things more simply or using analogies and to consider my audience, which I hope shapes how I write.

AE: How can our readers follow you and your writing?
SC: I’m fairly inactive on social media, though I tweet occasionally @StephenRCase and about my research projects @Herschels_Astro. The best place to find info on my writing is at www.stephenrcase.com. You can also join my mailing list there, where I send very occasional updates about new publications.

Stephen Case is a writer and a historian of astronomy living and working in Illinois. He has published over forty short stories in places like Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Shimmer, and Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, and his non-fiction has appeared in Physics Today, Aeon, and American Scientist. His novel First Fleet (Axiomatic Press) is Lovecraftian horror meets military sci-fi.

Crossing Bridges

by Sean Monaghan

Will advanced AI allow humanity to flourish in unexpected ways, or will it cast its creators aside? Sean Monaghan considers this question in the blog post below, as well as in his latest short story, “Bridges,” available in our [July/August issue, on sale now!]

When I first drafted “Bridges” the concept of AI—Artificial Intelligence—had been around for a long time, and there were inklings of it beginning to slip into the mainstream. I’d been fascinated by the “This Person Does Not Exist” image-generating page, with competitive AI systems creating an image that looked photographically like a person, but was really an amalgam of elements of faces from a huge database.

In the time since I completed the story, AI has become far more mainstream. ChatGPT apparently gained 100 million users faster than Instagram or TikTok. People are using it daily. Businesses are using it, and other similar systems, to analyze data, respond to customers and develop plans.

There are plenty of commentators more qualified than I am about the subject. I imagine that some of them are even AI themselves.

One of my favorite comparisons was discussing whether the advent of AI would be like the printing press or the atomic bomb. Is this a boon or the end of civilization as we know it? Star Trek or Terminator?

With my story, I started looking a long way out. More than decades, probably more than centuries. AI is still around, and imperfect, but we humans are but a sideshow.

Perhaps you, or someone you know, puts out seeds or sugar water for the birds? On my morning constitutional I sometimes see a woman going around with a can of cat food, gifting spoonfuls for strays.

These animals would do fine without us, but we feel good helping them. That’s my take, at least for this story, on AIs in the future. Humans would do fine, but AIs toss us the equivalents of seeds and spoonfuls of canned food.

And the AIs are not quite right. They’re not particularly benevolent, nor malevolent, nor are they human. They’re something else.

They look at the world a certain way, that’s not quite the way that we would look at it.

Much of the discussion I’ve seen seems to fall into two camps. Those who see job losses and, even, human redundancy. And those who see opportunity. Ways to free up the mundane drudgery of much of human existence.

And the AIs are not quite right. They’re not particularly benevolent, nor malevolent, nor are they human. They’re something else.

Creative people who see opportunity in the way that AI can create visual art, music, even writing. Perhaps not finished works, but works that stimulate new avenues of creativity.

That’s exciting.

There are many who note that what we have at the moment ought not to be considered genuine “artificial intelligence,” but more networks with a simple nature: very large language models. They’re smart enough to analyze vast bodies of data and recreate unique and clever outputs that seem reasonable and useful, but they’re not yet reasoning nor empathetic nor lateral enough to be anything more that very clever computers.

Of course, it’s early days.

Looking ahead through the mists of time, I wonder. Could Gutenberg have imagined what impact the printing press might have? Could those first clever souls who thought of connecting a couple of computers across campus have imagined the very power that the internet wields over our lives now? Could the person who put an axle through the center of a circular slab of wood have had any vague inkling of the pivotal impact that would have?

I suppose the metaphor of the title of my story—”Bridges”—is in looking for a link between our very human kind of intelligence and the very non-human kind of intelligence that may well be arising around us as we, perhaps, play with fire.

The world has always been changing, from letting wheels free us from dragging stuff through the dirt, to the idea of farming, or the invention of boats. I smile at the thought that cameras went from expensive, huge, delicate things in the hands of a few, to virtually all of us having them in our pockets, filled with more images than we can ever effectively deal with.

Science fiction posits possible futures. Sometimes they might be right. Sometimes way off.

I hope that we can cross our way through this next big change safely, but within that, I hope that I’ve written an entertaining and engaging story.

Sean Monaghan studied physical geography and geology, but often only notices once he’s completed a story just how much landscape has ended up playing a role. Previous stories in Asimov’s have featured volcanic calderas, tepuis, and ventifacts. His latest SF book is Dead Ringers from his Captain Arlon Stoddard universe, with the next, Tramp Steamers, due later in the year. He’s currently wrapping up his Karnish River Navigations series (more landscapes!), with the final two books due in 2024.