Silt is born into the cloudbanks of a gas giant, one of forty-three field-organisms in a birth-flock that supplies everything it’s ever needed. Warmth, navigation, direction, charge. It’s never fed alone. It’s never made a decision the flock hadn’t already made for it.
Then a shear event kills the flock in forty seconds and leaves Silt three hundred meters below where it started. That’s the book. Two hundred and sixteen pages of descent, told entirely from inside something that’s never seen a solid surface. No humans appear in it anywhere.
What came first in Cloudborn, the world or the creature?
The location. The first thing I had was a question about a place: what would a society look like in this kind of environment? The creature came second. The society was the much harder question, because it means the biology has to support a group and the group has to have rules and the rules have to come from somewhere. Everything in the book grew downward from that question.
A creature is a design problem. A society is a physics problem with consequences attached.
If forty-three of these things live together in a birth-flock, the flock has to do something for them. That means the biology has to be incomplete on its own.
In Cloudborn the flock supplies warmth, navigation, direction and charge, and Silt has never fed alone. None of that is decoration. It’s why the opening works, because when the shear event arrives it doesn’t simply kill forty-three organisms. It removes every system Silt has ever used to know anything.
Why set Cloudborn on a gas giant?
Because science fiction has been gesturing at it for decades and never doing anything with it.
The book is an amalgam of hints. There are novels that mention creatures living in the atmosphere of a gas giant, a line here, a paragraph there, something glimpsed from a ship on its way somewhere else. Nothing at this magnitude. Nothing that stayed down there and lived in it.
Enough hints to make you want to see somebody build the thing, and eventually you work out that the somebody is going to have to be you.
What did Richard Lowe have to solve before writing Cloudborn?
What the alien life would be. How it would operate. And how any of that could be communicated to a reader who’s human. That last one was the biggest problem in the book by a wide margin.
I didn’t want cartoons. I also didn’t want people in another form. That failure is more common and much harder to see while you’re committing it. Most alien fiction is human fiction with the serial numbers filed off: the creatures have societies that map onto ours, motivations that map onto ours, conversations that would work verbatim in a kitchen in Ohio.
I wanted them alien, or as much as I could manage while keeping the book readable.
How do you write a mind that has no words?
Silt doesn’t have language, in the sense of labels that can be detached from the things they name and moved around and applied elsewhere. What it has is experience organized into categories, held the way a hand holds a stone, by the configuration of the grip instead of by naming.
How did I arrive at that? I sat and thought about it for a long time.
I’d like to give you a method here and I don’t have one. I couldn’t explain to you how I solved it. I sat with the problem of how to communicate this without making them humans in another body, and it took a while, and then it happened.
Some things in writing work that way. You circle the problem until it opens, and afterward you can’t reconstruct the path.
Did Richard Lowe slip into human thinking while writing Cloudborn?
Constantly. I slipped constantly. What I did was write it anyway. I sat down and wrote the book as best I could, knowing the draft would be contaminated, and then I went through it in a deep edit and took out everything anthropomorphic I could find.
The method is less elegant than the finished book suggests. Write it wrong. Then hunt the humanity out of it.
What human habits did Richard Lowe hunt out of Cloudborn?
Four things kept getting in.
Dialogue. They don’t have it. Not as we know it. Anything that read as two characters speaking had to be rebuilt into whatever the actual exchange was.
Human concepts. Ideas that only exist because we live the way we live, arriving in the prose without announcing themselves.
Bodies. They have bodies, but not ones a reader can borrow. Every time I described one the way you’d describe a person, it was wrong.
Solids. This is the one that removes the most.
How do you write an alien with completely different senses?
A human being starts life looking at a ceiling. Then walls. Then a floor. Everything around us from the first moment is a solid thing, and the language is built out of that: floor, wall, ground, edge, stone, corner, surface, footing, foundation. Half of English is architecture.
Silt has none of it.
It feels gravity. It lives in a gravity well and the pressure gradient is one of its primary senses. But it has no floor. It has no ceiling. It has no walls. It’s never in its existence been contained by anything.
That’s the concept the book has to convey without ever naming it, because Silt can’t name it either. You can’t notice the absence of something you’ve never had. What replaces the architecture is pressure from below against pressure from the side, the chemical profile of the air, the electrical gradient building or having just discharged, and the collective field of the flock surrounding it like an additional layer of atmosphere, warmer and more textured than the ambient signal.
Those are the senses. There’s no view.
Forty seconds is a deliberate number. It’s long enough that Silt experiences it and short enough that nothing can be done, and the whole rest of the book is the consequence of a duration.
What follows is the descent. Scavenger shoals that strip the dead. A permanent storm no young field crosses without a route, and Silt has no route because routes were something the flock held. A suspension layer that blinds every sensor it has, which for a creature with no eyes means blindness of a kind a human reader has to be taught to feel.
The suspension layer is the stretch of the book I’m proudest of. Taking away the one sense Silt trusts, and making a human reader feel that loss without a single visual word to lean on, is exactly the kind of problem I wrote this book to go looking for.
Where did the politics in Cloudborn come from?
The story needed something to happen.
You can build the most interesting environment in science fiction and it’s still an essay until somebody wants something they can’t have. Below the descent there’s a shelf, and the shelf has a founding law saying it exists to receive those who arrive, and it also has limits, and its keeper has measured them.
The pressure comes from a law that says everyone is welcome, and a keeper who knows the arithmetic, and a young field-organism arriving from three hundred meters up with nothing.
Politics seemed like the right place to find the conflict, so that’s where I went looking.
Do novelists plan a book or discover it while writing?
This book wrote itself. I know how that sounds. I sat down and let it happen, and a lot of my fiction goes the same way. The deep-time books did it too. You establish the conditions carefully, you get the constraints right, and then the story is largely a matter of following what those conditions produce.
That phrase gets used as a mystical claim. It isn’t one, and what it means in practice is much narrower.
It means the work goes into the conditions instead of into the plot.
Get the environment right, get the biology consistent, get the rules of the society hard enough that they can’t bend when it would be convenient, and then most of what happens next is forced. Silt arrives at the shelf with nothing. The founding law says the shelf receives those who arrive. The keeper knows the arithmetic. Nobody had to decide what happens next, because the conditions had already decided.
The books where I plan heavily are usually the ones where I haven’t done that groundwork, and the planning is compensation. Cloudborn is marked as Book One of a planned trilogy. I have no idea where it goes. It’ll go where it goes.
Who is Cloudborn written for?
Me, mostly. I suspect most people won’t like this book, and I said that before it was published instead of after. It’s a survival epic narrated by something with no words, no face, no hands and no floor, and there’s no human in it to hold the reader’s hand. That’s a small audience by construction.
I wrote it to prove it could be done. To prove I had the chops to make it happen. It’s a proof of concept, and the concept is that you can write a non-human mind for two hundred pages and keep a reader inside it.
The comparison shelf is Peter Watts and Ursula Le Guin’s alien anthropology. Large claim, and I make it knowing what it costs if the book doesn’t hold up. Watts writes minds that don’t work like ours and never softens them. Le Guin built societies from their conditions outward instead of dressing ours in new clothes. Those are the two things this book is trying to do at once.
There’s also a practical argument for writing a book like this, separate from whether anybody buys it.
Every constraint you impose on yourself teaches you something that transfers.
Removing dialogue forces you to carry character through action and reaction alone. Removing solid objects forces you to build sensory writing out of properties instead of nouns. Removing human concepts forces you to notice how many of them you were reaching for without thinking. I write for clients across a wide range of subjects and voices, and the discipline of holding a viewpoint that isn’t mine for two hundred pages is the same discipline, run at a harder setting.
Every writer has books that exist to make money and books that exist to find out whether they can. This is firmly the second kind, and I’d write it again.
