It’s almost time! Dead Space, my fifth novel, comes out this Tuesday, on March 2, 2021.
There will be a virtual launch event hosted by Mysterious Galaxy on Thursday, March 4, at 7:00pm Pacific Time. Follow that link for info on how to register and join.
If you want a signed copy, you can order it from Mysterious Galaxy, but make sure you do it as soon as possible.
You can buy Dead Space as a paperback, ebook, or audiobook in all the usual places: your local indie bookstore | Bookshop.org | Powell’s | Barnes & Noble | Amazon
And a few other things:
My short story “Mrs. Piper Between the Sea and the Sky” is out in the March/April 2021 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. It’s about aliens and war and dead whales. It is my twentieth published short story.
Over at MAYDAY Magazine there is an interview with me about science and Salvation Day and many other things, conducted by Chase Erwin at the end of last year.
I wrote an essay for the Tor.com blog about the JRPG Persona 5 and why it’s so great to role-play as teenagers beating up giant sentient dicks while performing mind heists.
Now that the business is out of the way, I want to talk a bit about Dead Space.
I suspect it is the natural evolution of a writer’s relationship with her own books to spend most of the time between the final deadline and publication loathing everything about the book. That’s always the case for me, anyway, and I know I’m not alone. Dead Space is no different, and it also has the deeply unlucky status of being the book I revised and turned in during 2020, so all of my experiences of working on it were marked by external reasons anger, fear, frustration, uncertainty, and exhaustion. The significant disruptions caused by the pandemic bled over into the publishing industry; it was basically impossible for me to get the help I needed. (I had to beg a friend for a full-manuscript critique--she did fabulously, and I owe her so much. Thanks, Audrey!)
This is my fifth book; I know the routine by now. I know how slow it is. I know what work I can do, and I know what work I need other people to do. I know that the pandemic ruined everything and threw everybody’s lives and jobs and ability to work into chaos. And I know this is the sort of publishing problem we’re not supposed to talk about in public. Authors (especially female authors) are pressured--sometimes required--by our precarious position in publishing to always publicly perform gratitude toward the rest of the industry. It’s a troubling and toxic situation to put authors in, because pretending things are great when struggling behind the scenes is harmful to everybody.
The last year has stripped away the last shreds of patience I had for the performance. After what we’ve all been through, why on earth would anybody, in any situation, want to go along with pretending things are better than they are? Writing this book sucked. It was not fun. 0/10 would not recommend!
It has taken several months, but I have come back around to thinking that Dead Space is a pretty good book. I think it’s exciting and mysterious and a little scary. I love the characters. It feels bittersweet to see readers and reviewers telling me they would love a sequel, because I would also love a sequel (I have the best spooky-weird idea for it), but it is very unlikely to happen. I think I did all right, in the end, in spite of everything.
It’s funny to think back to before all the nonsense of 2020, when I was writing the first draft of Dead Space, and my biggest concern about it was that I was writing a book that is, in large part, about artificial intelligence, in spite of the fact that I know very little about artificial intelligence. I don’t even know anything about computer programming; my experience from grad school extended only as far as tweaking old Fortran programs for GPS data processing and writing occasional Matlab and Excel scripts to number-crunch.
I knew from the start I had a lot of research to do. I read a pile of books, including Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom, How To Create a Mind by Ray Kurzweil, You Look Like a Thing and I Love You by Janelle Shane, Deep Thinking by Garry Kasparov, and more. (Aside: I highly recommend You Look Like a Thing and I Love You. It’s informative and smart and laugh-out-loud funny. I loved it.) I studied a bunch of articles and watched a bunch of TED talks--something of a scattershot approach, because I wasn’t entirely sure what I was looking for. I wanted to know enough to make my fictional AIs relatively convincing and, more importantly, make my main character a relatively convincing AI creator. And I wanted to do it without the book being about the evolution of AI because, frankly, that’s not all that interesting to me.
The thing about AIs is that they are usually black boxes. We know what we put into them, and we know what comes out, but what happens in-between is hidden. They are built so that we don’t fully know what’s going on inside their computational brains. The whole point of AI is that it can think so we don’t have to. And the whole problem with AI is that, well, we’re the ones teaching it to think. You know. Humans. The same people who drive our cars through our garage walls and believe that homeopathic smoothies purge toxins and go out to bars during a pandemic and wear our masks beneath our noses and vote Republican. What business do we have teaching machines to think and expecting them to become sublime? We’re not even good at teaching ourselves to think.
AI theorists argue constantly about the future of Moore’s Law and the singularity and sentience and self-awareness and the rate of AI evolution and the inevitability of being taken over by AI overlords and all that, but so much of it is speculation and prediction and imagination, not research-based fact, which leaves quite a lot of wiggle room for the science fictionally-inclined writer. AIs are built by flawed, biased humans, and that means they often have all the flaws and biases of their creators. I realized, as I read more, that the challenge wasn’t in getting AI right; it was in getting the human experience of AI right. This was in the middle of realizing that so many of the big things humans build--social systems, economies, laws, governments, societies--are so much more fragile and vulnerable than we want to believe.
We can only ever write the book that’s in us when we sit down to write in a particular time and place, with our lives being what they are. I think the anger and uncertainty and helplessness I was feeling during the first half of 2020 shows in Dead Space, as does my intense frustration with the many ways in which humans can and do fail each other. If you had asked me a year ago, I would have said this was to the book’s detriment.
I don’t believe that anymore. I think it is a very different book than the one I set out to write, but it is also better, in many ways, and ultimately more human.
I hope you enjoy it.
Last year was a terrible year and anyone who says you should pretend it wasn’t is an ass. Love your books and can’t wait to see what else you write!
I love your honesty.
I had a blast reading my eARC of Dead Space from Edelweiss (I've already blogged/turned in my review), and I will most certainly buy a copy for my collection (and for reread purposes). I wish it success! and should you manage to write a sequel one day, I'm in 😉.