It’s live! After a few weeks developing cover design, various marketing elements, and emailing back and forth with Kickstarter staff, my campaign page for The Seed Vault is finally live on the Kickstarter platform.

I have a few conflicting thoughts on this, so bear with me. If you’re an author, don’t start ringing the alarm bells in your head and getting all revved up against a fellow author saying anything vaguely supportive about generative AI. The world is a complex system and unfortunately our primitive black-and-white thinking-and-feeling brain apparatuses often fail to grasp nuances of grey.

Fact: I meet more writers than readers these days. I wonder how many of us still read novels, excluding those who are writers. Google’s Gemini tells me 50% of the UK population regularly reads for pleasure. Another unverified AI snippet announces 12% of adults in the UK have read sci-fi in the last year. I find this hard to believe, from my IRL evidence. I probably met most of them.

A couple of beta-readers had wondered if The Seed Vault, my novel about the end of farming, had a hidden agenda. They started reading it tentatively, dreading a forced message about how meat is bad for the environment, or another food-based ideology beckoning under disguise. I’m sorry to disappoint people who fear such a message, or those who are passionate about spreading it, but … it’s just a story.

Sci-fi is a literature of ideas, and I haven’t hidden the fact that, often, ideas excite me more than people. My books start with stimulating topics, science, and research, and are spurred on by questions that I have no good answers for. Where do characters come in, though?  Are they merely vessels or second-rate guests in a plot designed to focus on a clever idea? Of course not.

A few years ago, I was toying with the idea of writing short stories about the five senses, and things that bring us pleasure at the most instinctive level. Eating, touching, hearing, and so on. Food was at the top of my list (I’m one of those people who lives to eat) but I had never really thought about what food is, and I wasn’t sure how to start writing about food in new and exciting ways.  

Writing speculative fiction means asking wonderfully strange what if questions. For example, a few of the questions that popped into my head after completing a beginner’s course on quantum mechanics: What if time only happens to particles with mass? The probability of the wave function assumes time. Waves are massless. When interacting with mass, waves turn into particles because they become fixed in time.

I don’t know why I write sci-fi. I know the circumstances that led me to writing sci-fi, but I don’t have a single, easily digestible, catchy and all-encompassing reason for preferring sci-fi over, say, family sagas. I read widely, including family sagas.

There is this thing called “worldbuilding” in speculative fiction (the wider genre comprising sci-fi and fantasy), which writers supposedly build and deploy as inconspicuously as possible (lest they bother the reader with the dreaded info-dump) as backdrop for a story.

I’m not a fan of over-sharing, unless I’m sitting across from you at a dining table. A blog does not come naturally. What on Earth do people write about on their blogs, or post on slick Instagram photos, or comment incessantly on ill-advised social media boards turned playgrounds for the far-right?