I’m much more concerned with character than I am with crime: with the impact of the events – the crime, if you want – on the characters, rather than the crime itself.
What I really love about both science and writing are the imaginative leaps that are required to discover something new.
Interview [audio + transcript] with Max Fox, M.E. O’Brien, and Tiana Reid, conducted by Nico Millman
Adriana contains both a Scheherazade and the sultan who wants to kill her. She is paralyzed, almost like the living dead, because she feels that the disappearance of her family foretells her own.
I was trying to capture the reality of the old Cambodian way of seeing the world, where there is another world that is alongside this world.
I love short fiction as a form . . . I think it’s able to speak to the kinds of concerns I want to think about when reading—loneliness, grief, regret, the human condition—better than anything.
Geared to Machine as Metaphor and Driver: An Interview with Michael Salu, Part II
Much of the digital realm as it is currently constructed has been shifted to become a facilitator, or enactor, of a fascistic societal structure . . . We are increasingly encouraged to forgo critical thinking and to ignore how society is actually formed and slide along its autonomous rails.
Geared to Machine as Metaphor and Driver: An Interview with Michael Salu, Part I
There’s an intense metaphysical battle for the soul unfurling. One’s will and agency is funneled through coiling mechanical algorithms by technologists—so knowing exactly what cognitive levers to pull and how is of great consequence.
It’s still an open question in my mind whether writing can inspire or support good and loving actions at the scale that it facilitates and fuels evil ones.
I didn’t have a grand narrative. I didn’t have one idea of what it meant. I had many ideas of what might be happening to me, what sort of transformation this was . . . I wanted to leave room for that uncertainty and that process of making up my mind.