Behind the Book: Peacekeeper: To What End Peace
I started Peacekeeper when I was fourteen and finished it forty-five years later. Here is the story behind an immortal admiral, an empire's peace, and the price of both.
Tag: science fiction
Science fiction earns its ideas by taking them seriously. These articles cover world building, the physics and logic that hold a story together, and writing futures that feel earned instead of decorated.
psychological suspenseBehind the Book: Shield of Ashes
Shield of Ashes asks what a real nuclear war would look like in a multipolar world. Here is how a short story about one launch became the biggest book I have written.
fiction writingBehind the Book: Collision with Andromeda
Collision with Andromeda sat unfinished for eight years. Here is the story behind a novel told partly from the point of view of a galaxy, and the lonely mind at its heart.
fiction writingBehind the Book: Dungeon
In 1981 I fell in love with a text game called Dungeon, the predecessor of Zork. Forty years later I turned it into a novel. Here is why, and the decision that saved the book.
ConsciousnessBehind the Book: The Eternal War
The Eternal War started with one question: what happens when an AI goes to Hell? Not a person with a soul, but a machine that cannot find the pattern in eternal punishment.
fiction writingThings We Lost After the Year 2000 and Why They Mattered
Nostalgia is mostly a lie, but some of what we traded away after 2000 cost us something real. DVDs you actually owned, phone numbers in your head, the map of your own city, boredom that fed your imagination. A clear-eyed…
fiction writingHow to Write a Story From an Alien Point of View
Most writers who try to write a nonhuman character just put a human in a costume. Writing a real alien, animal, or AI point of view means subtracting yourself, one assumption at a time, until what is left is a…
fiction writingWhat a Mars Colony Will Actually Look Like
The Mars colony in the movies, a gleaming glass dome with green gardens and sunset views, would kill everyone inside a week. The real thing will be buried under meters of red dirt, built by robots before anyone arrives, and…
fiction writingWhat Was the Big Bang, the First Nanosecond, and What Came Before
The Big Bang was not an explosion in space, it was the beginning of space, and the wildest events in cosmic history happened in the first sliver of a second. A plain-language tour of the first nanosecond, what the leftover…
fiction writingWriting Science Fiction That Sells
You built brilliant technology and nobody cares about your character. Science fiction craft that puts people first — with a subgenre comparison table and time travel rules.
fiction writingWriting Fiction Set in Virtual Worlds
Long before Silicon Valley discovered it, science fiction was living in the metaverse, Stephenson named it in 1992, Williams spent four novels there, Cline built a bestseller on it. Virtual worlds are one of the genre's deepest veins. Here is…
science fictionPeacekeeper: A Novel About Immortality, Sublight Warfare, and 200,000 Years of Duty
Admiral Jessica Lang is nearly 200,000 years old, having outlived everyone she loved, served governments that no longer exist, and fought wars history forgot. She is no superhero; she is someone who has lived so long the weight of it…