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.

Karawynn Long on Autistic Representation

Author Karawynn Long shares her experience as an Autistic person and discusses the ways Autistic people are beginning to make their voices heard in blogs, essays, videos, and literature. Read Long’s latest story for Asimov’s, “Hope Is the Thing With Feathers,” in our [July/August issue, on sale now!]

“Hope Is the Thing With Feathers” exists because in late 2019, mere months before my fiftieth birthday, I accidentally discovered that I’m autistic.

I managed to reach age forty-nine without the slightest clue to this important fact about myself because for decades the academic study of autism has been dominated by non-autistic researchers who began with erroneous assumptions about the condition and conducted their research unscientifically and through a biased lens. The result has been widespread circulation among psychologists of non-representative stereotypes and flatly inaccurate information; those in turn have been magnified and perpetuated—again by non-autistics—in popular media.

I was able to celebrate my fiftieth birthday as a self-aware Autistic person only because, in the last decade or so, authentic Autistic voices have gotten significantly louder. The number of first-person blogs, essays, books, podcasts, and social media posts has exploded, both driven by and driving a veritable tsunami of adult epiphanies. A whole cohort of self-aware Autistic research psychologists have entered the field, particularly in the UK, and their publications have begun shifting the academic conversation in a more accurate direction.

My first clue came from an unexpected quarter—a podcast episode which told the story of a woman very much like myself who went looking for help for her anxiety and—surprise!—ended up discovering she was autistic. I responded to this information in (what I now realize is) the most autistic way ever: by hoovering up absolutely every piece of information about autism that I could find. I quickly became aware of the vast divide between most of the academic literature and the lived experience of Autistic people, so my research leaned ever more heavily on memoirs and other first-person accounts.

In the beginning, I gravitated toward experiences and presentations that were similar to my own, but eventually my curiosity grew to encompass the experiences of autistics whose situations are very different. My particular version of autism came packaged with hyperlexia; I learned to both speak and read at a precocious age. But there are others who have almost the exact opposite experience.

So I sought out stories from autistic people who experienced various sorts of profound communication challenges. Some autistic kids are simply delayed: they don’t speak at all for many years, but eventually develop spoken language indistinguishable from non-autistic children. Others have “unreliable speech,” where they have imperfect mental control over the words and sounds they utter. And still others have verbal apraxia, a brain-body disconnect that impedes their ability to shape their mouths in the intricate ways required for speech. These challenges are often accompanied by full-body dyspraxia or apraxia, an experience that at its most severe might be likened to being “locked-in,” except that one’s body is not inert but acts in unexpected ways and contrary to one’s wishes.

I was able to celebrate my fiftieth birthday as a self-aware Autistic person only because, in the last decade or so, authentic Autistic voices have gotten significantly louder.

In these first-person accounts—blog posts and videos and published memoirs —a pervasive and tragic pattern emerged. Autistic teens and young adults described living without any way to communicate, often for a decade or more, while the adults around them mistook their lack of coherent speech for lack of intelligence. Kids who felt frustration and shame every time someone spoke about them as stupid, who were in terrible pain but had no way to explain the problem, who could read fluently but were forced to repeat the same basic alphabet drills for years. So much creativity left fallow, so much curiosity left to wither—it was horrifying to imagine. And these were the voices of the few who’d been offered a way out of the endless silence. How many more never get that chance?

In the wake of this awareness, I reached out to a former coworker—someone I liked and respected—who had just posted to social media about his challenges with his nonspeaking autistic daughter. I wrote and expressed sympathy for his difficulties and offered to share my insights and suggestions for a way to proceed that didn’t involve institutionalizing her. We corresponded in detail for about three months.

By the time I started talking to my friend about his adopted daughter, his family had already been living with the situation for almost a decade. He had very entrenched ideas about who his daughter was, and what her capabilities were, and my perspective challenged that narrative. He seemed open and grateful when we began our dialog, but ultimately he told me that what I had to say produced too much “cognitive dissonance” for him, and he rejected my viewpoint and my advice.

My heart broke: for him and the rest of his family, but most of all for this girl I’d never met. From his stories and descriptions it was obvious to me (though not to him) that she was in frequent and severe physical and emotional pain, and it was equally clear that without intervention, her circumstances would only deteriorate. It gutted me that I couldn’t do more to help her.

After a few months of sheer empathic agony, I attached myself to a new goal: to share something of the experience of nonspeaking Autistics with people who would not ordinarily encounter it, thereby doing some small part to push back against the misinformation and misunderstanding. A character voice coalesced in my mind, synthesized out of the memoirs I’d read and my own autistic experience.

The study of intelligence among non-human animals has been another long-term fascination for me, and I drew on that knowledge to create the Bird Lab and its psittacid and corvid denizens. (Being an autistic fiction writer is extremely satisfying when you can take two unrelated ‘special interests’ and combine them into something that feels greater than the sum of its parts.)

Because portraying a realistic character was my paramount aim, I hired two nonspeaking Autistic young adults to read and give me feedback on “Hope Is the Thing With Feathers” before I submitted it. One of them, Emily Grodin, is a poet and co-author of her own memoir, I Have Been Buried Under Years of Dust; I recommend it to anyone who is interested in a nonfictional account from a nonspeaking, dyspraxic Autistic. Other good books that I drew on include The Reason I Jump and Fall Down 7 Times Get Up 8 (by Naoki Higashida, translated by David Mitchell of Cloud Atlas fame), and Ido in Autismland (by Ido Kedar).

I had chosen to end the story with a quote from Ursula K Le Guin. My other nonspeaking reader, a young man named Otto Lana, told me (in email) that his feelings about “Hope” were summed up by a different Le Guin quote: “You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.”

Which—because I admire Le Guin so profoundly, and because it is both what my character was doing in the story and what I was seeking to do with the story —might be the loveliest response I could ever hope for, from anything that I write.

Thank you to Sheila Williams for giving “Hope” an audience.

Karawynn Long lives in central Mexico with her partner and three cats, where she’s writing an epic science fantasy novel. She also writes personal essays at https://karawynn.substack.com/ and can be found on Mastodon https://wandering.shop/@karawynn

Q&A With Sam W. Pisciotta

Sam W. Pisciotta’s work has appeared in many other fiction magazines, but “Morning Glory” is his first piece for Asimov’s, and you can read it in our [July/August issue, on sale now!] To mark Sam’s Asimov’s debut, we spoke with him about his favorite novels, his love of Virginia Woolf and Ray Bradbury, and his decision to give “Morning Glory” story an uplifting ending.

Asimov’s Editor: How did this story germinate? Was there a spark of inspiration, or did it come to you slowly?
Sam W. Pisciotta: I read an article about children not spending enough time playing outside. The idea is that as children spend an overwhelming amount of their time indoors on phones and video games and televisions, they’re spending less time in their backyards and in their neighborhood parks. A result is an increasing number of kids who are afraid of (or at least uncomfortable with) bugs and birds and other forms of nature. Honestly, I don’t know if the argument holds water, but it got me thinking.
Daisy is afraid of everything, and I’ve put her in a situation where she’s forced to confront her fears. She instinctively reaches for the technology that brings her comfort. Ironically, technology is the big, bad wolf knocking at her door.

AE: This is a dark story that takes a positive turn. Can you talk a little bit about why you made that decision?
SWP: Sure. “Morning Glory” could easily have developed into a dystopian story, and readers might even expect a dark ending as they plunge into Daisy’s world. But I wanted this to be a story of hope. I love both nature and technology, and I spend a lot of time with both. I believe that humanity can find equilibrium on this issue, and the idea that technology can bring us closer to nature appeals to me.

AE: How did the title of this piece come to you?
SWP: “Morning Glory” plays off the nature of those blossoming flowers: They open with light; they attract pollinators; they’re both fragile and resilient. Morning glories are an apt symbol for a character who comes to see the world differently and a world transformed by technology in a positive way.

AE: What is your history with Asimov’s?
SWP: This is my first story in Asimov’s, but I’ve been a fan of the magazine for much of my life. I’m so proud to have “Morning Glory” take a place in Asimov’s long history of beautiful and thought-provoking stories.

AE: Who or what are your greatest influences and inspirations?
SWP: Three names come to mind—Ray Bradbury, Virginia Woolf, and Ken Nordine. I loved what each of them had to say, and especially how they expressed their thoughts. Although they spoke with unique voices, I find a common thread in their works: language is beautiful and powerful and, above all, fun. I inherited that from them, I believe.
Also, I’m a fan of horror and dystopian literature, but I very much love a happy ending. Mostly that’s what I choose to write. For that, you can blame my lifelong addiction to Star Trek. I believe the direction of evolution is upward.

“Morning Glory” could easily have developed into a dystopian story, and readers might even expect a dark ending as they plunge into Daisy’s world. But I wanted this to be a story of hope.

AE: So, if you could choose a science fiction universe to live within, you would choose the Star Trek universe?
SWP: Absolutely. A life of exploration in a society that values tolerance and respect for others. There’s so much hope for humanity in those stories. The Federation establishes a society that allows for the expression of the individual. It’s the best of both worlds.
And of course, transporters. As a person who habitually runs late, I really appreciate the idea of a transporter. Oh, and who wouldn’t want to take a turn on the holodeck?

AE: What are some of your favorite books?
SWP: To the Lighthouse by Woolf and Dandelion Wine by Bradbury for their beautiful language. I’ve really enjoyed Okorafor’s Binti series, Wells’ Murderbot Diaries, and P. Djèlí Clark’s books in the Dead Djinn Universe. One of my all-time favorite works is The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schultz. It blurs fantasy and reality brilliantly, and I’ve always considered it a masterpiece. More recently, I finished Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land. What a read! It’s enthralling and utterly poignant. I admire the way the novel spans centuries but still ends with a splinter-sharp narrative focus.

AE: Do you have any advice for up-and-coming writers?
SWP: Read a lot of books, both fiction and non-fiction. Read poetry. Go to museums and art galleries. Talk to strangers. Walk through forests and sit on beaches. Every now and then, lie down and look up at the stars. Your creative soup requires ingredients.
Writing has always been an important part of my life. I remember writing stories for my mom when I was a kid. But I was older when I started writing seriously and with purpose. I sometimes wish I would have started writing speculative fiction sooner, but I was living life and gaining experiences that would eventually work into my fiction. The years have taught me the value of balancing hard work with daydreaming.

AE: How can our readers follow you and your writing?
SWP: You can follow me on Twitter and Instagram at /silo34. I’m also a visual artist, so you’ll find my artwork online, as well, particularly on Instagram and at my website: http://www.silo34.com.

Sam W. Pisciotta lives in Colorado. After years of difficult training in daydreaming and doodling, he now calls himself a writer and visual artist. Thousands of cups of coffee and hours of contemplation have prepared him to pull worlds from the ether. Sam is a member of SFWA, HWA, and Codex Writers. He holds a Master of Arts in Literary Studies from the University of Colorado. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Analog, F&SF, Factor Four Magazine, and other fine publications. Sam’s award-winning artwork has been shown throughout Colorado.

Q&A With Garth Nix

We’re kicking off our latest series of blog posts with an interview featuring acclaimed author Garth Nix! Read on to find out how he started writing, whom he writes for, and what he believes is the best kind of writing practice. Nix’s latest story for Asimov’s, “Showdown on Planetoid Pencrux,” appears in our [July/August 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?
Garth Nix: I had the two main characters in mind early on, and as is usual for me, they lurked there for quite some time before I started writing. I didn’t know a lot beyond that they were survivors of a lost war, and differently human, and it wasn’t until I started actually putting words down I realized I wanted to write it as an SF Western. Also part way through, when I needed some small genetically engineered animals, I was reminded of the character Eet from Andre Norton’s novels The Zero Stone and Uncharted Stars, so I named my eets after Eet, in an homage to one of my favourite authors from my childhood and teenage years.

AE: Is this story part of a larger universe, or is it stand-alone?
GN: This is a standalone story, or at least it is now. But I have a tendency to set up everything I write as if it could be part of something bigger, while still being satisfying on its own. It is quite possible I might revisit the characters and the setting in future stories.

AE: How did the title for this piece come to you?
GN: I usually come up with titles very early, sometimes before I write anything else. In this case, I wrote the first few paragraphs and knew it would be an “SF planetary adventure/Western” and so I wanted a kind of classic Western-style story title, and “Showdown” is such a good word, I had to use it.

AE: How did you break into writing? My first paid writing pieces were role
GN: playing game articles and scenarios (for D&D and Traveller) written in my teens, and then short stories. I had a great early start where I sold the first story I sent out when I was nineteen years old, but it was rather illusory, as I wrote maybe twenty stories over the next few years but couldn’t sell them, and in fact sold my first novel when I was 25 before I ever had another story published. But it is all good practice, writing a story is never wasted time, no matter what happens (or doesn’t) with that individual story.

AE: What inspired you to start writing?
GN: Reading. I started writing simply because I wanted to emulate the writers whose work I loved, I wanted to write stories like they did. This has largely driven my entire writing career, I want to write the kind of stories I want to read.

“…Writing a story is never wasted time, no matter what happens (or doesn’t) with that individual story.”

AE: What other projects are you currently working on?
GN: I usually have multiple projects underway. I am finishing a children’s dark fantasy/horror novel right now, which is scheduled for publication in 2024; and noodling away on an adult SF novel due out in 2025; and making notes for a fantasy novel in one of my existing series which if all goes well will be out in 2026. But I also have several stories partly written, and no doubt will finish them and start some new ones, and I have some screenwriting work as well.

AE: What are you reading right now?
GN: I read very widely across all kinds of fiction and non-fiction, but in terms of SF/F, I just read and enjoyed: Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh, and Unconquerable Sun by Kate Elliott. I also caught up with the third novel (which I’d never read) in Alexei Panshin’s highly entertaining Antony Villiers series from the 1960s, now collected with the first two in New Celebrations.

AE: Do you have any advice for up-and-coming writers?
GN: There is no writing advice that works for everyone. Try out different things, don’t take one approach as gospel. That said, if you have something out on submission, or have self-published, don’t sit around waiting for something to happen with acceptance or sales, get to work on something new. It will take your mind away from worrying about that past work, and whatever happens for good or ill, a new work will give you new opportunities. Every new story, book, play, poem, screenplay, gets you another spin of the wheel. You can’t make things happen, but every finished work creates possibility.

AE: How can our readers follow you and your writing? (IE: Social media handles, website URL…)
GN: @garthnix on Twitter
facebook.com/garthnix
http://www.garthnix.com

Garth Nix has been a full-time writer since 2001, but has also worked as a literary agent, marketing consultant, book editor, book publicist, book sales representative, bookseller, and as a part-time soldier in the Australian Army Reserve.

Garth’s books include the Old Kingdom fantasy series: Sabriel, Lirael, Abhorsen, Clariel, Goldenhand, and Terciel and Elinor; SF novels Shade’s Children and A Confusion of Princes; fantasy novels Angel Mage; The Left-Handed Booksellers of London and sequel The Sinister Booksellers of Bath; and a Regency romance with magic, Newt’s Emerald. His novels for children include The Ragwitch; the six books of The Seventh Tower sequence; The Keys to the Kingdom series and Frogkisser!

More than six million copies of Garth’s books have been sold around the world, they have appeared on the bestseller lists of The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, The Bookseller and others; and his work has been translated into 42 languages. He has won multiple Aurealis Awards, the ABIA Award, Ditmar Award, the Mythopoeic Award, CBCA Honour Book, and has been shortlisted for the Locus Awards, the Shirley Jackson Award and others.

Q&A With Ursula Whitcher

In this week’s blog post, we chat with Ursula Whitcher, whose latest Asimov’s story, “The Fifteenth Saint,” appears in our [May/June issue, on sale now!]. Read on to learn about what inspired “The Fifteenth Saint,” and discover how Whitcher balances her fiction career with her work as a mathematician.

Asimov’s Editor: What is the setting of “The Fifteenth Saint”? Is this story part of a larger universe, or is it stand-alone?
Ursula Whitcher: “The Fifteenth Saint” takes place on the far-distant planet of Nakharat. That’s the same setting as several of my other published stories, including “The Last Tutor,” which came out in Asimov’s in 2022. But “Fifteenth Saint” is set quite a few years earlier than “Last Tutor”: the characters and situations stand alone!

AE: What was the inspiration for this piece?
UW: The spark for this story is extremely erudite—maybe that’s fitting for a piece involving a judge obsessed with poetry! In his dissertation on the early modern Ottoman empire, Jonathan Parkes Allen describes a sprawling book written by a sixteenth-century Sufi mystic and equipped with a marvelous technology: an index. By consulting the index, a reader could find whichever piece of the holy man’s advice was most relevant to their specific problem. The book simulated the mind of the saint.
I loved the way Allen’s analysis highlighted the disruptive potential of the lowly index, a technology we take for granted. I also knew that my far-future Nakhorians were intensely suspicious of certain technologies—specifically artificial intelligence, which they viewed as destructive and amoral. I wondered how they would respond to a simulation of a saint.

AE: The protagonist of “The Fifteenth Saint” is named Sannali Emenev, but some characters call him Sani or Nalek. What’s with all the different nicknames?
UW: If Tolstoy’s characters can have a stack of different names, so can mine! But more specifically, the man Emenev is in love with calls him Sani, while Emenev’s family calls him Nalek. Nalek is the normal Nakhorian nickname for a boy named Sannali; Emenev’s family has used it ever since he was a little kid. Sani is a gender-neutral nickname, and by using it, Emenev’s friend acknowledges that Emenev’s approach to gender and sexuality is more complex than one might guess from his very conventional public presentation.

AE: It sounds like you do a lot of research for your writing. What’s the most surprising piece of research that went into “The Fifteenth Saint”?
UW: I learned that nobody manufactures snow tires for buses! I replayed the same thirty seconds of a news story on Montreal bus maintenance on a loop, watching city workers adapt tire surfaces for winter weather and imagining how the process would look different with lots more robots.

AE: The artificially intelligent book in “Fifteenth Saint” often quotes poetry. What’s your favorite poetic form?
UW: I’ve never met a poetic form I didn’t enjoy, from Latin hexameters to iamb patterns inspired by Yoon Ha Lee’s dystopian hexarchate. But one of the forms that has most fascinated me in recent years is the duplex, an English form involving cascading couplets that Jericho Brown invented after experimenting with ghazals. I first encountered the duplex in a poem that ends:

What’s yours at home is a wolf in my city.
You can’t accuse me of sleeping with a man.



AE: A fraught, queer relationship and hints of the supernatural—I can see why this poem resonated with you! What other poetry have you been enjoying recently?
UW: I really enjoyed Alycia Pirmohamed’s collection Another Way to Split Water, especially the poem “Meditation While Plaiting My Hair.”

There are ways in which fiction can feel more personal than math—but I never have to worry that a fictional lemma will be false!


AE: In an earlier interview, you mentioned Le Guin as an influence. What other science fiction writers are major influences on your work?
UW: When I was twelve or so, I read and re-read R.A. MacAvoy without knowing how to explain why: her books weren’t conventionally escapist in a way I recognized, and there were definitely pieces I was too young to understand. I think some of MacAvoy’s meditative approach from books like Tea with the Black Dragon seeps into “The Fifteenth Saint.”
On a more recent re-read of C.J. Cherryh’s Downbelow Station, I was startled by her invocation of “the Deep”! In Cherryh’s work, the Deep is the parts of the galaxy that aren’t well-traveled, while in the universe of Nakharat it’s a different kind of space that enables faster-than-light travel. But I unconsciously picked up on Cherryh’s use of the Deep for symbolic effect!

AE: Writing and submitting creative work can entail setbacks and heartbreak. Why do you keep doing this?
UW: I think I have a different take on this process than many newer writers because, in my day job, I’m a mathematician. The cycle of submission, rejection, and resubmission is broadly similar across disciplines. But when doing research mathematics, not only do you inevitably worry about whether your project will be popular, you have to confront the possibility that you might be utterly, incontrovertibly wrong. I spent three months last summer trying to count solutions to the same equation in three different ways and getting three different answers, and this is a story with a happy ending: I eventually figured out which of those numbers was correct!
As a PhD student, I spent a lot of time being scared, first that I would never prove an original result, and then that the first time was a fluke. But as I matured as a mathematician, I realized that every project had its share of confusion and uncertainty, as well as flashes of joy. I began to treat managing the swirl of emotion around research not as separate from the work, but as part of the work.
I took some of that acceptance of the swirl with me as I started to submit fiction for publication. There are ways in which fiction can feel more personal than math—but I never have to worry that a fictional lemma will be false!

AE: Can you tell us about some mathematics you’ve been enjoying lately?
UW: I loved playing with the tools on Gabriel Dorfsman-Hopkins’s website that offer ways to visualize arithmetic in the p-adic numbers. Individual p-adic numbers are familiar fractions, but the notion of distance for p-adics is very different from our usual ideas of what makes two numbers close together. These tools suggest different kinds of intuition—and they’re full of rainbows!

AE: Are there more Nakharat stories in the pipeline?
UW: Yes! I am absolutely thrilled to tell you that North Continent Ribbon, a collection of Nakharat stories including an all-new novelette, is coming out from Neon Hemlock Press in 2024. When you put all the Nakharat stories together, the society itself becomes a character, with its own sort of arc plot. I’m so excited to share that transformation with the world.

AE: How can our readers follow you and your writing?
UW: I’m on Twitter as superyarn and I’m yarntheory@wandering.shop on Mastodon. My website is yarntheory.net, and if you want updates about what I’m writing and publishing, you can subscribe to my newsletter at buttondown.email/yarntheory. I try to make sure every newsletter issue has at least one really good cat picture.

Ursula Whitcher is a mathematician, editor, and poet whose writing can be found everywhere from the magazine Cossmass Infinities or the anthology Climbing Lightly Through Forests to the American Mathematical Society’s Feature Column

Q&A With Andy Dudak

by Andy Dudak

Find out how, spy novels, the nature of propaganda, and a Peter Gabriel song inspired Andy Dudak’s latest Asimov’s story, “Games Without Frontiers” in our [May/June issue, on sale now!]

Asimov’s Editor: What is the story behind this piece?
Andy Dudak: I had the notion of a KGB assassin lining up a snipe that’s meant to look like a missed kill, resulting in paralysis, so that a Russian mole can gain trust in the State Dept. I came up with this after digesting various spy novels, including The Spy Who Came In From The Cold by John le Carré. Then this sniper story lined up with an older sci-fi idea I’ve tried to use before: an entertainment future where the superstars are improv actors/gamers interacting with complex game worlds and AIs.

AE: How did the title for this piece come to you?
AD: The title is a Peter Gabriel song. I was a kid during this era and I later got into shows like The Americans and Deutschland 83 which juxtapose the music and the geopolitics of the time—the Cold War set to ‘80s pop.

AE: What are you reading right now?
AD: I’m currently translating “Hyper Distance” by An Hao for Clarkesworld, which certainly involves reading. I have books lined up for when I have time/bandwidth: A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas de Quincey, Invasion of the Spirit People by Juan Pablo Villalobos, Frog by Mo Yan, Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir, Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt, and Fifth Sun by Camilla Townsend.       

AE: What is your history with Asimov’s?
AD: “Games Without Frontiers” will be my first original in Asimov’s. My translation of Chen Qiufan’s “Forger Mr. Z” was in the Nov/Dec 2020 issue. I think I was submitting during the before-times of paper submissions, but I know I got serious again around 2012.

AE: Are there any themes that you find yourself returning to throughout your writing?
AD: I often come back to the nature of propaganda, secret police, paranoia, fear, PTSD, and re-education. That’s partly down to some strange life experiences, but also great books like The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson, and The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa.   

AE: What inspired you to start writing?
AD: Dungeons & Dragons, without a doubt.

AE: What other projects are you currently working on?
AD: I just finished novelizing my short story “Salvage” (Interzone Jan/Feb 2020, The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 6 edited by Neil Clarke, and The Year’s Top Hard Science Fiction Stories #5 edited by Allan Kaster). Now begins the great querying challenge.

AE: How can our readers follow you and your writing? (IE: Social media handles, website URL…)
AD: andydudak.home.blog
Twitter: @andy_dudak

Andy Dudak has translated 39 stories by 24 science fiction luminaries, including Liu Cixin, Chen Qiufan, and Bao Shu. His original fiction is featured in Neil Clarke’s Best Science Fiction of the Year, Jonathan Strahan’s Year’s Best Science Fiction, and three volumes of Rich Horton’s Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy. His story “Love in the Time of Immuno-Sharing” was a finalist for the Eugie Foster Award. He believes in the healing power of Dungeons & Dragons. 

Q&A With Lavie Tidhar

Lavie Tidhar can find inspiration in almost anything, from space junk to vending machines. Find out what Lavie is reading these days in today’s blog post, and read his latest story for Asimov’s, “Zoo Station,” in our [May/June issue, on sale now!]

Asimov’s Editor: What is the story behind this piece?
Lavie Tidhar: I was really interested in space junk for a number of years, having met someone who was working on it in Hong Kong, and then discovering the work of Australian space archaeologist Alice Gorman. I eventually did a short story called “Junk Hounds” to explore some of that stuff, but it was still sort of itching at me. I think I was looking into what it would take to keep livestock in space, and these things sort of converged, and combined with my being into re-reading (or in some cases, discovering new) some of that low-key 1950s SF, which is quite downbeat, like Fredric Brown’s “The Last Train.” So those things all came together at the same time, and this was the result!

AE: Is this story part of a larger universe, or is it stand-alone?
LT: Weirdly, this one is stand-alone. Most of my SF stories take place in a shared universe—I guess we’re calling it the Central Station universe at this point, just because that book did quite well—but that world is brighter than the one in this story. I have a bunch of stand-alone SF stories (I’m thinking of something like “Blue and Blue and Blue and Pink” from Clarkesworld) but they’re relatively rare!

AE: What made you think of Asimov’s for this story?
LT: I never assume anyone is going to publish anything I write, so all I ever do, and have done since the beginning, is write the stories that come to me and try to send them out. I don’t have some magic wand! So Asimov’s is one of the magazines I will always try, and hope, and sometimes, like with “Zoo Station”, I just get lucky!
Saying that, I do find SF is usually easier to place for me. It’s when I go wacky and wild that it becomes more of a challenge. The same for crime stories—they’re very hard to place, unless there’s a rare anthology open. But that’s the nature of it! I think it’s pretty amazing I still get to write and publish short stories!

AE: How much or little do current events impact your writing?
LT: I obviously try to keep up with what’s going on, and there’s always inspiration hiding in plain sight. So reading an article about as unlikely a topic as vending machines—something I never paid any attention to in my life!—led to a story called “Sirena” (in The Dark magazine), all because it had a line in it about vending machines killing people every year. I mean, how! And of course with “Zoo Station”, questions of conservation, rewilding, space junk, all of this stuff is really important, not as fictional constructs but as urgent real world issues. So I try to keep up, but also, putting on my SF writer hat, try to take a much wider perspective, beyond the present. If that makes sense!

AE: What other projects are you currently working on?
LT: What aren’t I working on . . . My other “hat”, which is more recent, is as a more mainstream writer, writing these sort of big novels, starting with last year’s Maror and continuing this year with the only-slightly-smaller Adama. My UK publishers, Head of Zeus, are incredibly supportive on that side, and I’m really enjoying suddenly being so . . . respectable. Ha! So I’m working on a third novel, which sort of goes from the 1850s to the present. No elves or aliens! as I like to say.
On the SF side, Tachyon in the US have been equally supportive, and I’m lucky to keep doing genre books, or weird mixes—I really love The Escapement, from 2021, and last year was Neom, a science fiction novel set in that wider world of Central Station. This year we’re doing The Circumference of the World, which is all about science fiction—it’s a weird, mixed-genre novel that circles around the idea that an L. Ron Hubbard-like, Golden Age of SF writer just happened to have—maybe—figured out the true secret of the nature of the universe. Or did he?
I also have The Best of World SF: Volume 3 coming out this year, which has been a joy to edit. The full series is now over half a million words of fiction!
And then, I just keep writing short stories, which is the only part I really love doing. So yes, busy!

I obviously try to keep up with what’s going on, and there’s always inspiration hiding in plain sight.

AE: If you could choose one SFnal universe to live in, what universe would it be, and why?
LT: I’m not sure I would like any of them! But the post-scarcity utopia of Iain M. Bank’s Culture novels is certainly appealing . . .

AE: What SFnal prediction would you like to see come true?
LT: I think it’s a bit like the historian who was once asked, if they had a time machine, what period of history they would like to visit—“none before the invention of antibiotics.” Medical science is something we take so much for granted in SF—autodocs and nanobots and effortless organ replacement and so on (I just did a story about growing replacement organs, a la the planet Shayol in Cordwainer Smith)—but so little in real life. I’d love to see some of that start to come in, just as it’s amazing to see how much of it is already here, from brain scanning to new approaches to vaccines.

AE: What are you reading right now?
LT: I just finished an epic re-read of all the Amber novels by Roger Zelazny. That was so much fun! I mostly read for research these days, so my shelves sort of go from circuses to the Thames to Israeli spies to the Romans, depending on what my present obsession might be—right now it’s an academic dictionary of Northern Mythology. For fun, I’ve started re-reading Barry B. Longyear’s classic Circus World, a mosaic novel first published in a series of short stories in Asimov’s! Such a brilliant book.

AE: Do you have any advice for up-and-coming writers?
LT: Write the things only you can write.

AE: How can our readers follow you and your writing?
LT: My website it at https://lavietidhar.wordpress.com/
And I’m on Twitter https://twitter.com/lavietidhar And I sometimes post random stuff on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/lavietidhar/

Lavie Tidhar is the author of the World Fantasy Award winning Osama and the Campbell Award winning Central Station, along with many other recent novels. His latest, Neom, began as a short story in Asimov’s. “Zoo Station,” he tells us, was inspired by reading about the challenges of raising livestock in space, which combined improbably with discovering Fredric Brown’s classic story “The Last Train.”

Q&A With Laurel Winter

Laurel Winter is a frequent contributor to Asimov’s who has won our Readers’ Award for best poem twice. In this blog post, she discusses her unique writing process, her favorite themes, and why she’s leery of warp drive. Check out her latest poem for Asimov’s,”What if Pomegranates,” in our [May/June issue, on sale now!]

Asimov’s Editor: What is the story behind this piece?
Laurel Winter: It’s possible I was eating pomegranates. Grin. Besides that, I’m fascinated by both Persephone and Eurydice, inhabiting the underworld against their will. I’ve written several poems about both of them.

AE: Do you particularly relate to any of the characters in this story?
LW: I can relate to both Persephone and Demeter. Avenging mother goddess energy—but also the idea that she could have decided to let the girl make her own decisions and live with the consequences. And Persephone might have actually appreciated hanging out with the bad boy for half of the year, as long as she could go home to mama the other half. The best of both worlds.

AE: What is your history with Asimov’s?
LW: I’ve published numerous poems in Asimov’s and won the Reader’s Poll Award for best poem twice. “Why Goldfish Shouldn’t Use Power Tools” and “egg horror poem” each received a Rhysling Award as well. The latter was then picked up for multiple 9th grade literature textbooks.

AE: Are there any themes that you find yourself returning to throughout your writing? If yes, what and why?
LW: I have a particular fondness for characters who think they’re ordinary and find out they are not. Also coming of age stories, rites of passage. I seem to write a ton about music, although I am not musical myself. I have quite a few stories and poems about food.

AE: What is your process?
LW: A while ago I started computer dating. As in dating my computer. An hour a day, six days a week. I also set times on it—if I hadn’t started my date at one, I had to start it by four. That way, I didn’t get to bedtime and blow it off. I got amazing amounts of work done, finishing a middle grade novel I’d abandoned in 2006 and writing a first draft of another one, as well as numerous stories. Every once in a while, if the date was going really well, I fudged a little and gave the computer a little more attention. (I think it likes me like that. Grin. So it didn’t mind.)

AE: What inspired you to start writing?
LW: Being a total bookworm. Words were my friends. Books were my refuge. Notebooks were my infinite possibility.

I have a particular fondness for characters who think they’re ordinary and find out they are not.

AE: What other projects are you currently working on?
LW: I’m spiffing up several novels. The Secret Life of Suzuki England, about a girl who’s three-quarters elf. Lucy, Lucy, and Liz, which is related to Suzuki, about an alien, an elf, and a human girl tasked with saving the world—with their piano trio. And my newest, Eleven in Wonderland, about an eleven-year-old genius who has to navigate alcoholic parents and eighth grade and the wild new wonderful world of drama club. Plus—always—poetry. And I’ve recently begun to get story ideas from fragments of anything or nothing. So, busy busy.

AE: If you could choose one SFnal universe to live in, what universe would it be, and why?
LW: My first thought was Middle Earth. Hobbits and Elves and Wizards—but no, maybe Redwall—but, ooh, yes, for sure, Pern. Telepathic communication with flying dragons. Fire lizards. Going between. The pick me, pick me, pick me feeling of a hatching. Yeah, that’s it.

AE: What SFnal prediction would you like to see come true?
LW: At this point, definitely NOT warp drive. I think we need to get more civilized in our local neighborhood before we go gallivanting off across the galaxy. Probably the replicator, because that might ease food & water problems across the globe. Then the Federation could come in and ease us into full galactic citizenship.

AE: Do you have any advice for up-and-coming writers?
LW: Celebrate baby steps. (I submitted a poem/story/novel! I must take myself out for tea!) Embrace baby goals. If you can’t manage an hour for computer dating, write two sentences every day on the current project. If you write, you’re a writer. If you send something out—please do!—start working on something else. And the next something else. Especially if you write novels. It can literally take years for an editor to get back to you with a No, thanks. (And once I had to withdraw a manuscript after said years, because the editor did not respond to any queries, or to the news he was out.) I let myself sour on novels for some years after that. Sometimes it takes creative work of a different sort—even collaging magazine cut-outs for your delight only—to get you back in the swing of things. Also, writer’s groups are good, unless they’re bad. Fortunately, I have not had this experience, but some people delight in being cleverly and cruelly critical. Run! And don’t be that guy. Also, celebrate vicarious accomplishments of your friends or acquaintance and keep on keeping on with your own work.

AE: How can our readers follow you and your writing? (IE: Social media handles, website URL…)
LW: Facebook Laurel Winter
Twitter @LuvLaurelWinter
laurelwinter.blogspot.com
laurelwinter.com

Laurel Winter is happy to report that every decade of her life is the best so far. She has two amazing sons she both likes and loves, as well as three bright and shiny grandchildren. She lives in southern Oregon and is doing a good job of practicing house-in-order, creatively and physically and soulfully. She is a proponent of cheerful self-appreciation and believes you can only love others if you love yourself.