Writer Jessica Powell and I talk about our writing and AI via the Alaska Quarterly Review ↗

I'm on the Scrivener podcast! (I seriously love Scrivener, a writing program that is like a perfect meld with my brain.)↗

"The classic questions science fiction has about artificial intelligence take a backseat in After World—and rightly so...Instead, After World is interested in what the act of writing does to you. It is also interested in what it does to the world." - from a really thoughtful review of my novel by Bren Ram in the Ancillary Review of Books↗

I'm a guest on Vice's Cyber podcast! Where I talk about AI, climate change, the future, and my book...↗

"After World is a book that goes hard. Pitiless, merciless and relentless, it takes you to the darkest depths of climate despair and reveals the indestructible beauty at our species' core." - from Cory Doctorow's review of my novel!↗

"I worry that we’re forgetting how amazing this all is. Rather than feeling cursed or worried, I feel lucky to get to be here and witness such a change to how we think, live, read, understand, and create." - from my essay on why I'm excited as a novelist about AI for LitHub↗

I would like Donald Antrim to read all of Donald Barthelme's stories out loud please. ↗

"For one, it's a project of joy, because we're listening to an animal and we're trying to interpret - and, at the same time sperm whales are still with us, and they're magic." -David Gruber from Project CETI↗

Timelapse of the future, including the end of the universe...↗

Read an excerpt of my novel After World which is coming out...December 5! ↗

"If I were younger and more full of foolish energy, I’d probably take the time to rebut McCarthy’s detractors, critics who take to task both his baroque style and dark themes. The truth is I don’t care—I’ve got the books, I’ve read them and reread them, and I know what’s there and how it rewards my attention." - from Edwin Turner's beautiful riff on Cormac McCarthy's death and a long-term relationship with his books ↗

"The human brain is a wonderfully made tool for forming interesting connections between all sorts of different things. Articulating these moments of synthesis is one of the joys of any creative enterprise, and being able to do so with precision and robust illustration is the skill every writer and thinker tries to develop. The first steps towards doing this can be extremely messy. They have been for me, and I think they will continue to be rather messy." - Nick Seitz in an insightful and often surprisingly beautiful essay on note organization! ↗

If you happen to have a daughter who wants to be a writer, and that daughter is in fact writing her own novel, and it's also summer, and you're looking for a fun yet wise podcast to listen to at lunch together, check out Let's Make A Sci-Fi. ↗

Writing an ecocentric story is really hard. This story nails it and is so, so good: "The Author of the Acacia Seeds, and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics," by Ursula LeGuin ↗

“It turns out despair is its own kind of power, its own kind of freedom. And then I think: If enough of us fall into a dark enough despair, who knows what we can do together. This is the only hope I have left.” - Andrew Boyd, I Want a Better Castrophe: Navigating the Climate Crisis with Grief, Hope, and Gallows Humor ↗

"If the present rate of decline continues, the yellow-eyed penguin will likely be gone from the planet in ten or twenty years. It is difficult to be here watching them and not feel somewhat slammed by this information. What a thing to lose! Go look them up. The candy red beak, the pink go-go boots, the yellow mask angling back from the eyes. They’re the Flash, they’re 1970s Bowie! I don’t mean to imply that adorable, showy species are of more value or somehow deserving of more concern. It’s just … damn." - Mary Roach, Fuzz↗

"We have been making meat from live animals for 12,000 years, of course, but with an accelerating climate crisis and a population of 10 billion to feed by 2050, growing crops to feed farm animals simply does not make sense." -Bruce Friedrich, Good Food Institute ↗

After 6 or 7 or 8 or 10 years of working on a post-apocalyptic novel, I lost track of time, I can finally say, with confidence, that I know how to spell "apocalyptic."

"Among the essays, a real stunner is 'The Cave' by Debbie Urbanski. This tremendously creative work steps over the boundary between nonfiction and fiction as the narrator/writer keeps questioning herself about how to tell the story — what to leave in, take out, interpret one way or another, even fabricate..." - The Anchorage Daily News reviewing the latest issue of AQR! ↗