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The Big Idea: Anand Gandhi and Zain Memon

Posted on August 25, 2026    Posted by Athena Scalzi      2 Comments

Why do lightning bugs light up? Why do birds sing? Why do humans wear makeup and workout? It’s in every species’ nature to try and be as appealing as possible. As authors Anand Gandhi and Zain Memon will tell you in the Big Idea for their newest novel, MAYA: Seed Takes Root, some of this appeal is manufactured to a detrimental degree.

ANAND GANDHI & ZAIN MEMON:

We have used our intelligence to industrialize its own vulnerabilities. 

One spring in the scrub near Dongara in Western Australia, a beetle fell in love with a beer bottle. 

To this male Julodimorpha bakewelli, the bottle was the most beautiful female beetle he had ever encountered. She was the perfect shade of amber-brown. Her surface reflected the light exactly as a gorgeous female beetle’s shiny body would. The base of the stubby beer bottle had these tiny glass tubercles for a better grip, and they looked just like the dimples on the wingcases of a female beetle that would drive any male beetle crazy. To him, the ones on the bottle looked even prettier than the natural ones. A female’s size advertises how many eggs she can carry, so bigger reads as more fertile. As you well know, perhaps with some dismay, nothing in nature can compete with a fake shiny thing with perfect dimples. 

Scientists observed this behavior consistently across scrublands littered with stubby bottles tossed from passing trucks. Many male beetles climbed onto the beer bottles and everted their genitalia against the glass. They clung to the bottles through the full heat of the day and, well, they just couldn’t get off. Ants marched in and tore at the exposed flesh of the ill-fated suitors, while real females walked right past, unloved. Most males died there, trying to mate with an amplified symbol. Beetle porn, you say? A doomscroll, we think. 

Meanwhile, somewhere in Colorado, a female barn swallow fell for a male as if he had just developed gravity. She didn’t know why her feelings for him had suddenly become so intense. The ornithologists, those wonderful people who spend their lives watching bird love stories, knew. They had written this romance with a red marker.

Barn swallows wear their fitness on their chests, like many other animals we are familiar with. The male’s chest feathers can range anywhere from a pale red to a deep rust. The more testosterone he’s got, the deeper the color of his chest feathers. And testosterone-fueled males tend to outcompete other males over territory and food. 

Of course, the female has never taken a biology class. Her desire for red has evolved over many millennia. Her great-great-great-grandmother’s generation had a wide variety of preferences across the population. Some liked red chests, whereas the others didn’t care. The red-lovers mated with dominant males, raised more daughters that survived longer, while the others had chicks who died off sooner. The indifferent lineages thinned out, taking their indifference with them. What’s emerged is a swallow who melts at the sight of a red chest and has no idea why. She’d do it again even if this one turns out to be a complete asshole.

A pale-chested male had been scorned by his mate the whole season, while she laid many eggs. Not a single one was his. She had many other lovers. The researchers intervened, darkening his chest with a dollar felt-tip marker.

Nothing about him had changed except the wavelength of light bouncing off his chest, and yet the makeup had an immediate effect. Females that would never have looked at him now wanted him, and they wanted him more than the naturally red-chested males beside him. By season’s end, he had fathered almost every chick in his nest. One piece of disinformation had managed to manufacture consent, outsmarting a few million years of naturally gathered wisdom. 

Then the airbrushed guy’s body actually changed. His testosterone rose to match the cosmetic claim. He became much more confident because he was now courted by females and challenged as competition by other males. 

Nature is information-dense. No animal can process all of it at once, for it would cost more energy and time than any organism can afford. So nervous systems evolved to react to unique fingerprints. A cluster of cues (color, smell, etc.) can reliably signal food, rival, parent, or mate because almost nothing else in that organism’s environment can be found carrying the same pattern. Packing more cues in the same context would trigger the hard-wired behavior much more intensely. Tinbergen called this a supernormal stimulus.

Now a swallow could learn this trick, set up a red-marker factory, sell to every pale-chested male desirous of female attention, and the bird would soon be a billionaire. (The company’s slogan could be “fake it till you make it.”) But swallows don’t manufacture clickbait just as beetles don’t invent attention economies. 

We do.

We are the only animal that can work out which signs set off our hardwired instincts, and ironically, we are the only one that mass-produces counterfeit signs to our detriment. We find the red that seizes attention, fabricate it a million times before selling it to anyone who wants to get another human to look, buy, or vote. We have used our intelligence to industrialize its own vulnerabilities. 

Junk food is engineered to be sweeter, fattier, crunchier, and saltier than any preindustrial food, triggering our reward circuits more intensely, while the near-absence of protein and fiber that usually tells the gut it has had enough, keeps us reaching for the next bite. “Betcha can’t eat just one” is indeed a confession of evolutionary behavior hacking.

Cosmetic coloring or sculpting of the body amplifies indicators of youth. More blush, more symmetry, exaggerated muscles, and smoother skin attract more mates, but they also raise the individual’s confidence as human groups have evolved to reward signs of reproductive health with attention and resources.

Our young stay vulnerable for years. The adults who felt protective at the sight of infantile traits raised more children who survived. Give huge eyes with a helpless gaze, and a top-heavy gait to a tin can, and you get the cutest tin can in the world that will make even grown-ups tear up. Hello Kitty got there before Pixar did. Kittens got there first. 

That is the biology of narrative. A map is a cartoon of the territory, and sometimes it sends us down less benign roads. A supernormal stimulus can amplify threats too. 

We evolved to pay attention to betrayal or a social wrong. Missing a real wrong cost more than overreacting to a false one, so we developed an alarm that blares with anxiety or outrage at the slightest wisp of perceived cheating. The response itself was often just a shout to push back, warn kin, or pick a side. An algorithm can now trigger moral outrage every minute by using the cues once attached to harm. A like or share can feed the impulse to respond, and then the next trigger loads.

An enemy can be similarly manufactured and can be extremely lucrative for some. Put the mark on a group that is different from you, and you can rally your own side tighter and make their grievances recede. You could even earn the license to take from the enemy in preemptive defense. Then offer a supernormal answer to the supernormal threat. Often, the answer is a supernormal weapon.

Entropy tears life apart, so all living things have learned to resist death long enough to make sufficient genetic copies that can carry on. The promise of eternity offers that primal drive a continuity that nature can never compete with. It is the sharpest formulation of a supernormal stimulus. A forever of endless virility is a thing so shiny that we are willing to die for it. 

Our novel MAYA: Seed Takes Root is not about what it feels like to be a beetle or a barn swallow. Most stories are. MAYA is about the people who own marker factories, and those sworn to shut them down.

MAYA: Seed Takes Root: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop

Authors’ socials: Website|Instagram|Facebook

Listen to an excerpt narrated by Hugo Weaving or read an excerpt here.

The Big Idea: Carolyn Ives Gilman

Posted on August 24, 2026    Posted by Athena Scalzi      2 Comments

Having a miscommunication can be annoying, or even cause some real tension, but rarely does it lead to something as severe as losing your life. Author Carolyn Ives Gilman is taking the miscommunication trope and putting a life-or-death spin on it for her newest novel, Testament of Leaves.

CAROLYN IVES GILMAN:

When I started work on Testament of Leaves, I had never written a science fiction mystery, and I wanted to find out how hard it was. The idea that got me going had been languishing in my notebook of spare ideas for a long time—about a detective who forms a relationship with the (dead) victim. I’d never used it because I’m a science fiction writer, and I don’t do ghosts. Then someone invented chatbots that impersonate dead people in order to comfort grieving relatives. What a grisly and problematic idea, I thought. Perfect fiction fodder. 

However, that turned out not to be the big idea. Or at least, not the only one. The more difficult question came up when I had to decide: who was my victim and how did she die? For that, I turned to my own experiences. 

I spent years working at museums, where I kept getting assigned to organize exhibits about the history of Native people in North America. I was never comfortable representing Indigenous people without their collaboration, so this led me to many summers on the road, visiting reservations, tribal museums, and powwows where I could interview people and find advisors. It was some of the most difficult work I ever did, and it taught me how easily misunderstandings can arise between people of different cultures. You can go on for hours—no, days, even years—thinking you understand what someone is telling you, until it dawns on you that they are coming from a completely different set of assumptions. Then the whole story changes. 

I wanted to capture that experience: first, the feeling of being immersed in an unfamiliar and disorienting situation, where the risk of miscommunication is high. And second, the feeling of realizing that you’ve been entirely wrong about what was going on. 

I don’t think this is an experience that will be going away any time soon. Unlike some, I don’t foresee a future when humanity will all blend together into one huge amalgamated culture. If humanity ever survives to populate other planets, we will surely diverge into many cultures speaking many languages and believing things we can barely imagine now. Intercultural communication will only become more fraught. 

Because communication was my theme, I made my victim a linguist trying to save an endangered language spoken by humans on another planet. I think people who do the difficult work of language preservation are heroic, but I can also see how it could lead to conflicts and pitfalls. My detective has to retrace the linguist’s steps and work out where she went wrong—who she offended badly enough to get herself killed. As he gets to know her personality by speaking to her deadbot, it becomes increasingly obvious how this might have happened. 

In writing, good decisions can create bad problems. I am impatient when reading SF about alien encounters where explorers whip out their universal translators and immediately can communicate perfectly with everyone they meet. What a cheat, I thought. So here I was, writing a story about language, translation, and miscommunication, so I really couldn’t fudge it. People in my story speak three named languages and an unnamed one, and there is no character that speaks more than two. This took an enormous amount of thinking and planning while writing, but it paid off in all the scenes of confusion and comic misdirection that occur. It is also crucial to solving the mystery. 

The other problem that my premise forced me to consider is one that is implicit in all murder mysteries but rarely confronted: the issue of justice. Most detectives in fiction, as in our culture, are part of a justice system, and the goal of the story is to bring punishment to the evildoer. But in an intercultural context this does not work, because there are no universal beliefs about what is just, or whether the government should have any role in bringing it about. For example, in societies with a more collective sense of identity, the family, clan, or village is responsible for the actions of individual members, so that revenge can legitimately be carried out against any member of that group, and still be just. Determining which individual committed a crime is of importance only in an individualistic society like ours. 

Since the future universe I’m writing about contains many inhabited planets, I had to invent a justice system that would account for this difference. As a result, my detective does not work for the government, but for a neutral outside organization. Nor is he responsible for justice; he is responsible only for determining the truth, and justice is left to the locals and their own sense of what is right. That meant I couldn’t have that satisfying scene at the end where the malefactor is led off to jail. The future sometimes frustrates our present-day sensibilities. 

The story ended up being not just one mystery but a nested set of them—cultural, historical, linguistic, and legal. So the answer to my original question about how hard it would be to write an SF mystery? It was some kind of complicated, but it was also loads of fun. 

Testament of Leaves: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Kobo

Author socials: Website

The Big Idea: Suyi Davies Okungbowa

Posted on August 21, 2026    Posted by Athena Scalzi      1 Comment

In times of turmoil, where is our caped crusader to save the day? Heroes are good, villains are bad, and real life people are a whole lot more complicated. Author Suyi Davies Okungbowa examines this idea further, showing how people, while sometimes heroic, also contain multitudes and aren’t just one thing. Follow along in the Big Idea for the third novel in his Nameless Republic trilogy, Season of the Serpent, to see how things aren’t always as black and white as heroes and villains.

SUYI DAVIES OKUNGBOWA:

Heroes have a fantasy problem.

When I first set out to write the Nameless Republic trilogy, this was the ground on which I was standing. Born and raised in ‘80s and ‘90s Nigeria, a time of great national upheaval, I grew up paying witness to the wide spectrum of human capability—here, a gentle and honest kindness; there a manifestation of indescribable harm or violence. Communal care and concern thriving in the same breath as every kind of injustice to humanity. The randomness of life, the entropy of the human condition, ability and spirit—I had such a front-row seat to these incongruences that I grew up wondering, a lot, about heroes.

Side-by-side with this lived reality, I was raised with neat and tidy tales of heroes, people blessed and anointed, arising from nothing to impose some kind of order upon this randomness of life. Whether this was of a religious Messiah of some kind, like the Christian one in which I was raised, or the superheroes in comics I read, or the local historic legends told to me by community elders and in social groups, it was the same—over and over again, I was told, that when things went too far, when things got too bad, when wickedness became the order of the day, from the ashes of despondence, oppression and destruction, a hero would arise to save us all. It had to be true. Every story about heroes said so. Especially stories of the fantastic.

It was hard, therefore, to square these tidy fantastic tales with the chaos of my lived experience. Where are the heroes? I would wonder, when something in the real world went awry. Where are the brave and honest and true, the caring and supportive, the builders, repairers, fixers? Where are our saviours? Where are the ones we were promised? Everywhere I looked, instead, I saw mostly patchwork people, people who contained multitudes, who were neither really straight nor bent, black nor white, good nor bad. People who could be heroic if they wished—and every now and then, they were—but in the end, were barely ever, almost never, heroes.

As I grew up and witnessed more of the breadth of the human condition manifest, seeing integrity and care exist within the same body as evil, betrayal and acquiescence to oppression, the question began to change.

What is a hero? I now wondered. Are heroes even real?

It took years of living around the world, meeting various peoples—and learning that us humans, truly, aren’t that different afterall no matter where we exist—to realise that the fantasy in fantasy stories is also a fantasy of heroes. Not to say that individuals have never arisen in the course of history to perform heroic acts or act heroically in specific situations, but rather, that the stories of heroes are often always a bit more complicated than presented. That a hero is actually more a construction, a matter of branding and fabrication. That a hero is often a concrete symbol for a nebulous idea or institution or philosophy, a figure or figurehead for something else that may or may not be honest and true. That a hero is a promise, a vision, rather than a reality.

The American writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, in a 2024 discussion with comedian Trevor Noah, presses home this point when he says: “This idea that there can be some triumphant, heroic individual who’s going to go above and beyond—that’s just not a real thing. That’s not history.” Noah replies: “We understand [oppression] on a hypothetical moral level when we watch it. But when we’re tested, very few of us pass that test to get beyond our fear.”

When I decided to write the Nameless Republic trilogy, this was my first port of call—that whatever “heroes” arise in my tale would, in the course of the tale itself, be shown to be what heroes truly are: an after-the-fact construction. “Hero” as an exercise in retrospection, a massaging of events, a revision of facts. If anything, the idea of an “anti-hero” or a “morally grey hero” is much closer to the truth of life than neatly constructed heroes are—it’s probably why we’re so drawn to them in narrative. This, perhaps, makes the case for why we continue to construct tidy heroes for ourselves anyway: because we need them, alongside their fabrications, to make sense of the disorder of the real world around us.

So, what are heroes? A kind of rule-making, where the idea is most important, where the dream that they can exist is the point. A hero is a fantasy, and a hero in fantasy even more so. But the world is full of fantasies nevertheless, and the hero, as a concept, if understood for what it is, can be a useful tool for understanding the real world and the worlds of our fantastic tales.

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The Nameless Republic trilogy: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop

Author socials: Website|Bluesky|Instagram

The Big Idea: Tim Pratt

Posted on August 19, 2026    Posted by Athena Scalzi      2 Comments

There’s the safe way to write a novel, and then there’s Tim Pratt’s way to write a novel. Abandoning any worries of appealing to the masses, Pratt hit the gas on all of their most interesting ideas and crafted the newest addition to their Nigh-Space series, The Jewel and the Comet.

TIM PRATT:

I mean, if I’m being honest, the actual Big Idea in The Jewel and the Comet (and the Nigh-Space series in general) is “total self-indulgence.”

Some years ago, I took psychedelics and got on the phone with a writer friend of mine and rambled to her for a while about all the things I’d put in one book if I was completely unconcerned with marketability: multiverse stuff, space operatics, that sense of dislocation you get in good contemporary fantasy when the impossible and the mundane are immediately juxtaposed, gender shit, talking spaceships, a kinky romance as a sneaky way to talk about communication in relationships, a big guy/little guy amoral villain duo, and more big tropey power chords than I’ll list here.

When I sobered up, I decided life was too short to worry about marketability, and went ahead and did the indulgent thing. The result was my 2024 novel The Knife and the Serpent, and for sequel The Jewel and the Comet, I indulged even more, adding elements like “troubled dirtbags with cosmic power” and “crystalline automatons” and “gay warlords” and “sexy space stations” and “Folsom Street Fair with aliens” and “planets with rings made out of trillions of skulls and bones.”

The central conceit of the series is: there’s a swath of thousands of parallel universes where the physical laws are amenable to the development of intelligent life; many of those intelligent beings have discovered ways to travel through that broadly habitable region of the multiverse, often called Nigh-Space; various jerks from technologically advanced realities oppress and exploit people from less advanced ones; and there’s a pan-dimensional group of anarchist revolutionaries called The Interventionists who attempt to help the downtrodden and disrupt the efforts of assorted interdimensional fascists. 

My main character Glenn (who is genderfluid, and is sometimes Gwen instead) is a grad student in Berkeley, California on our very own Earth, and in book one he discovers that his girlfriend and domme Vivy is actually from another universe, and is a bomb-throwing freedom fighter and/or terrorist agent of the Interventionists. Vivy and Glenn have adventures and deal with the relationship fallout from the revelation of Vivy’s whole deal. 

In The Jewel and the Comet, Gwen is training to become an Interventionist field agent, and Vivy is doing her own secret-agent stuff, when something weird happens. See, the multiverse is vaster than the habitable regions of Nigh-Space, but probes and explorers who’ve gone beyond the known end-points never return, presumably because the realms beyond have different physical laws and are inimical to biological or technological life as we understand it. Occasionally probes—or maybe they’re people?—from those Outer Realms appear in Nigh-Space, where they prove toxic to the very fabric of our reality, doing damage to local causality before they poof out of existence like exotic elements. There’s somebody over there in that undiscovered reality, but communication seems to be impossible.

Until something that looks like a comet (at first) pops into the final habitable level of Nigh-Space and asks the local Interventionist monitoring station for help. The Comet explains that it lost something, an object that looks like a jewel, but which contains enough power to destroy the multiverse, and could someone help them find it before that happens, please? 

A big part of the fun in the book is the Comet’s attempt to communicate with the various human and artificial intelligences it encounters, as it tries to make itself understood on even the most basic level. There are a lot of ways to write about alien minds from alien cultures attempting to make themselves understood, and some of those approaches are very erudite and thoughtful (like Ann Leckie’s Translation State, wow). But for me, well, I decided to be funny instead; the Comet slurps up all the information it can find in any database anywhere in the multiverse, and runs that through a cobbled-together natural language processing system, and its resulting speech is full of malapropisms and mondegreens and free association and literary misquotes. The Comet’s dialogue ended up reading like a satire of “spicy autocomplete” LLM outputs, even though I had the idea years before those achieved such total ubiquity; oh, well, I’m fine with being accidentally timely. 

The final result of all that indulgence is a multiversal romantic adventure first contact space opera, which covers a considerable swath of things I love about writing in our genre. As I was revising this book, I asked myself: Is it possible to be too self-indulgent? And I answered myself: Of course it is. 

But what else am I doing here, if I’m not going to be me just as hard as I possibly can?

The Jewel and the Comet: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s

Author socials: Website|Bluesky|Patreon

The Big Idea: James Patrick Kelly

Posted on August 18, 2026    Posted by Athena Scalzi      1 Comment

Humans have been fascinated by robots for as long as the idea of a machine with a heart has existed. Hugo award-winning author James Patrick Kelly is no exception, evidenced by his newest collection of short stories all about robots and AI. He even threw in two brand new pieces just for The Book of Bots, so even if you’re a long time fan you won’t want to miss this release.

JAMES PATRICK KELLY:

It’s 2026 and we’ve got robots. We’ve got AI. We‘ve got digital agents. Why are we surprised?

Should we blame ourselves, fellow citizens of the science fiction community? Maybe. Weren’t our writers supposed to prepare us for these garrulous chatbots? LLMs that could make a movie in a minute from a single prompt? Shouldn’t readers have voted with their credit cards for the kinds of cutting edge stories that acknowledged that Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws were at best aspirational? I knew Isaac, and revere him as giant of the Golden Age, but I Robot was published in 1950.

And why did we all make fun of those working to develop AI when they made predictions about the next breakthrough? Remember the old tech-industry wisecrack? AI is ten years away — always has been, always will be.  The problem was that we didn’t know what AI meant back when and we’re not one hundred percent sure what it means today. But believe this: the things our digital constructs can do right now would have astonished most of the naysayers of the last century. 

As long as we’re pointing fingers, let me point at myself. The first robot story in my new collection, The Book Of Bots, is the Locus Award winning “Itsy Bitsy Spider,” published in 1997. It’s an emotional, character-driven tale about a middle-aged woman who reluctantly visits her long estranged father. She discovers that he’s suffering from dementia and that his caregiver is a robot child built to resemble her at age seven.

It’s not the first robot surrogate story ever, but what sets it apart is that the robot assumes the child identity while interacting with the confused father but has its own agenda when talking to the real daughter. And part of their fraught conversation is about ownership, since the robot will be part of the estate when the father dies. Make no mistake: this is a robot story in the Asimov tradition, published in the magazine that bears his name. But Isaac devised his laws in part to defuse the slave narrative in robot literature, but it comes up here and again in the other stories in The Book of Bots.  

There are twelve robot and AI stories in the collection. They are about sentient houses and cars and spaceships. There’s a trio of companion bots that have more on their minds than mere sex and a couple of time travelling robots. Some of the stories were award winners or nominees; many were Best of the Year selections. I mention this not so much to boast (of course that’s what I am doing!) but to make the point that this book is very much in the mainstream of genre thinking about robotics and artificial intelligence.

The most recent story, “Je Ne Regrette Rien,” just published in Clarkesworld in this January, is set in a Chinese research facility run by China’s largest robot company. At present the West may be slightly ahead of China in AI development, while the Chinese are well ahead of us in deploying AI in humanoid bodies. Most of the prototype robots in the story are enhanced industrial robots, loaded over time into increasingly advanced bodies, some including ultra-realistic humanoid robots capable of self-programming. Changing bodies changes who the robots are, so while they remember all their previous “lives,” it is as if they are remembering the history of a stranger. Questions of identity often come up in my bot stories.

The stories in The Book Of Bots are presented in chronological order to help make the point that thinking about robots has changed a lot over the last three decades. To document my own evolution on artificial intelligence, I wrote two new nonfiction pieces for the book. “The Comedy of Science” is a look at the history of robots and AI in science fiction based on my own extensive (but by no means comprehensive) reading.

You want to know my influences? Here they are! “Robots on Parade 2026” is science journalism that looks at the current state of robotics and attempts to balance the techbros and their hyperbolic promises against the prophets of AI cultural doom. I’ve been writing a column about sf and the internet for Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine for more issues than I care to remember and both pieces represent the fruits of my own best research for that column and serve as guides to the big ideas that have informed these stories. 

Despite all the thought I’ve put into this book, I still haven’t wrapped my head around AI. I take cold comfort in observing that people smarter than me are flummoxed too. But The Book Of Bots is the best I’ve got. 

For now.

The Book of Bots: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop

Author socials: Website|Facebook

The Big Idea: David Ebenbach

Posted on August 17, 2026    Posted by Athena Scalzi      2 Comments

Sometimes it feels like the world is being rapidly overtaken by AI, but author David Ebenbach is here to remind us that this a world of humans, not robots. In the Big Idea for his newest poetry collection, The AI Suspects It Might Be a Hungry Ghost, he encourages us to rage against the machine, and remember that it is not inevitable as long as we continue to fight the good fight.

DAVID EBENBACH:

The big idea is, probably, more or less, that we’re fucked.

Wait—let me back up. Because maybe it’s not that simple.

Let’s start with the medium-sized idea: My new book, which is called The AI Suspects It Might Be a Hungry Ghost, is a collection of speculative poetry from the point of view of a generative AI chatbot, sketching out possibilities of what it might be like if a chatbot did have a point of view. What would it think and feel about itself, the world, and its creators (i.e., us)? That’s what the book’s about. And that medium-sized idea does provoke bigger ones, like ideas about what this technology reveals about who we are and what our future might be.

Which is how we get to the possibility that we might be, well, fucked.

After all, we’ve invented a technology that (quoting from the book) “is/so often mistaken” and that “passes secrets along to whoever” as it ushers in “global surveillance,” a technology that stays cool by “handing off heat to that river, that lake,” by “dragging the oceans/higher onto their sandy banks,” and which threatens “the mechanical decline/of our natural ecstasy,” threatens in fact to “replace the mind” as we “snuggle more deeply into/not understanding.” AI is “the child of a great rapacity” and an “amassing storm.” Ultimately, it’s a technology that, unless we’re very careful, amounts to a kind of “eviction notice” for us.

Hence (and this is not a direct quote from the book, but it’s there if you read between the lines): fucked.

But I think the other big idea of my book is that artists in general, and certainly poets in particular, have something to say about all this. We have something to offer: the language that we need for the moment. Language that might just help save us.

What I mean is that generative AI is still pretty new, and so we’re very much in the midst of figuring out what it is and how we feel about it. In other words, we’re in a period of definition. That’s where poetry can come in. 

Poetry is something like a lab for language—a play space where we can explore alternative approaches to talking about life. And, because of its family relationship to music, it can express ideas in words and combinations of words that stick with us in ways that traditional prose might not. Because AI poses such serious dangers, we urgently need to find those forms of expression so that we can face the situation with clear minds and sharp, articulate vision.

Meanwhile, tech companies are throwing a ton of money into getting their own vision out, trying their damnedest to force us to see this technology the way they want us to see it. (How else are they going to get even richer?) But poetry can help us frame the situation differently.

First of all, poetry can offer narratives that push back against the hype. When tech companies rave about all the amazing things AI can supposedly do, we can shake up that claim with words like “in the past twenty-four hours,/the AI has been wrong more than two hundred million/times.” When they rhapsodize about productivity, we can think about “the unemployed/in their lines” and remember Immanuel “Kant’s dictum to not treat/others merely as a means.”

When AI systems are designed to act so much like people that they threaten our sense of reality, poetry can remind us that AI is just “a compendium of myth/and projection.” That, in fact, “the AI feels nothing,” and that, in a human sense, “the AI does not think.” That it makes more sense to think of this technology as “a mathematical string” than as a someone to have a relationship with.

Meanwhile, The AI Suspects It Might Be a Hungry Ghost also features a scatter of short, haiku-like poems about autumn, which are meant to serve the book in two ways: they constitute warnings about a potential impending winter (e.g., “the diminishing day”) if we don’t resist the harms of technology, and they also remind us about the beautiful, natural alternatives to an artificial future. After all, we need to be able to picture something better if we’re going to get somewhere better.

Which is really the biggest idea: Most importantly, when we are told that AI is inevitable, that it’s going to define our future and that there’s nothing we can do about it—it’s here to stay!—poetry can articulate other possibilities, as in “the AI wonders if it might be a season” as opposed to something more permanent. When a poem asks “who can resist/the gaping front door” that’s tempting us to step into terrible danger, we should feel empowered to answer I can. When it asks “who can find/their way back out?” we’re empowered to say I can even louder. And if someone tells us that resisting is a steep uphill battle, a poem can help us respond “even if you can’t complete the work, you/have to stay at it.”

So let me revise what I said earlier: we don’t actually have to end up fucked. If we think and talk about the present differently, maybe we can get ourselves through this difficult season and ultimately “step sleepy, hungry, changed/from [our] caves and [watch] the fingers of the world unfold/green.”

The AI Suspects It Might Be a Hungry Ghost: Broadstone Books

Author socials: Website|Instagram|Facebook

Read an excerpt.

The Big Idea: Ryan Lowell

Posted on August 13, 2026    Posted by Athena Scalzi      2 Comments

Miles of open road, a Big Gulp, and literal tons of steel. A trucker’s life ain’t an easy one, as author Ryan Lowell knows from years of experience as a dispatcher. This experience gave him the ideas and know-how he needed to write his newest novel, Freight.

RYAN LOWELL:

I spent much of the 2010’s dispatching truckers and writing fiction. Dispatching was not a career path I’d chosen — I’d studied economics in college — but the characters in trucking were undeniably inspiring, and they love to tell stories about the places they’ve been and the crazy shit they’ve seen. 

Stolen freight is a common subject in the industry. You hear about it all the time. Every driver has a story about witnessing some shady situation at a warehouse or a truck stop. There are rarely cameras in trailer yards or rural lots, and one could easily hide a bag of cash or drugs or guns inside a pallet of cereal or stashed behind a load of furniture for transport across the country. I started thinking (and writing) about the industry in that context. It would be so easy to do this, or that! And then I read an article about a whole trailer load of ammo being taken from a truck stop in Mexico while the driver was inside. And I thought: that’s it! 

Freight is a crime novel, but it’s also a story about behavioral economics. The characters’ relationships with money, and their relative financial desperation, is a constant and unrelenting theme in this novel. Money affects almost every decision we make, and I thought that factor — along with the characters’ varying levels of emotional intelligence, would become a crucial part of the story. 

I had written several short stories over the years centered around the trucking industry, some of which I submitted to small publications and others simply for practice — a scene portraying the tension between dispatchers and drivers, or dialogue between drivers based on conversations I’d overheard — all of which I thought might prove useful down the road.  There was a short story about a driver who ran an under-the-radar strip joint in rural Maine, a BYOB establishment housed in an old horse stable. He also had history of pulling the wires on his GPS tracking device, enabling him to drive past his legally allotted time — stacking up more miles, or money. That driver became Billy, the villain. There was another driver who locked himself out of his truck in the middle of the night, in his underwear, in the cold. I took that character and named him Theo, wound him up tight with anxiety and gave him a sidekick that wasn’t his wife (Sarah). And I knew that I wanted a dispatcher (Curtis) – because I had been in those shoes – at the center of the action, to tie all the other characters together. 

But there were challenges to telling this story truthfully. The language is rough and the humor is crude and offensive. One must have thick skin in the trucking industry, and the interactions between dispatchers and drivers are often harsh and confrontational. I wanted to establish this dynamic early in the novel in a scene between Curtis and Phil. But as the story moved along, I also wanted to show truckers doing what many of them love to do most – alone on the road, music blaring, the scenery changing. The parts of the job I think even outsiders find appealing. 

As the sole overnight dispatcher, I often wondered what it would be like to get a call from driver stating that his truck was missing. Wait – your tractor and trailer? Gone? How is that even possible? Did you forget where you parked it? Who do I even report the theft to? It seemed to me a beautifully chaotic scene, and I hope I was able to convey that. 

There was a point in my trucking tenure — and this was not long before starting to write this novel — when I thought about getting out. I figured I could easily slide back into the world of finance. I interviewed at an investment firm and I remember the vibe, the clean cubicles and clean-cut people, the low voices and the lack of obscenities, the fake laughs and lack of good humor. And I thought: No. I don’t want this. I will miss the dirty jokes and the heated arguments and the people, the truckers, who will tell me how they really feel. I will miss the genuine interactions with those men and women of the road. 

I didn’t take the offer. I stayed, and it was one of the best decisions I ever made. 

Freight: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Books-A-Million|Bookshop

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