We chat with award-winning author Seth Dickinson about his science fiction debut Exordia, which is described as Michael Crichton meets Marvel’s Venom!
Hi, Seth! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?
Hello readers. I am Seth. I write for video games and for books and everything good in my life came from playing with Legos as a child. Even my beloved partner of seventeen years. I met her through a chain of events that began with Legos. My parents said to me, “Spend less time writing about Lego spaceships, and more time on your schoolwork,” and I said, “No.” And I was right, I was right.
When did you first discover your love for writing and stories?
I was a child, I had a Lego city, I think I started making up stories about Lego versions of myself and my brother. They were named ‘Paul’ and ‘Jim’. Recounting this I am emotionally anxious: was I fair to my brother’s character? Was I a good Lego brother? O, I do not recall.
Later we moved on to Lego spaceships. I believe I had this idea about three aliens from Pluto who’d been stranded on Earth, and one of them, his name was Glorb, he encountered a snotty little child named Seth. And, seeing through his super alien intelligence that Seth would never turn out as anything good, he vaporized Seth and took his place, so as to pass himself off as a harmless child while repairing his spacecraft. There was an old dumping site in the woods behind my house, where all kinds of twisted metal and rotten glass and car parts would bud from the ground in the spring. And I’d take kids from my school out there and say: see, here is where my spaceship crashed.
This may strike you as sickeningly quirky but I assure you it eventually developed into severe behavioral issues and years of depression
Quick lightning round! Tell us
- The first book you ever remember reading: STARTIDE RISING by David Brin. Not the first I’m read I sure but the first I remember.
- The one that made you want to become an author: The credit her belongs not to a book but to my first and second grade teacher, whose name was Mr. Man or Mr. Mens or something like that. The man Mans.
- The one that you can’t stop thinking about: THE SECRET OF OUR SUCCESS by Joseph Henrich. I believe its thesis wholeheartedly and uncritically the way pop history readers believed in GUNS GERMS AND STEEL twenty years ago. It will probably turn out the same but I will not be dissuaded by common sense.
Your latest novel, Exordia, is out now! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
Snake woman courts Kurdish faildaughter
What can readers expect?
A gripping, intimate opening about your secret dream of having a cool alien roommate. You’re really getting into it when after three chapters it morphs unexpectedly into a technothriller about first contact with a nightmarish alien artifact, a bit like The Andromeda Strain meets Google Deepdream. Action like Predator or Independence Day plus a lot of philosophizing about drone strikes, the right way to pursue justice in an unjust world, and the role of math in the origin of the universe. You like it but you kind of wish it had kept the pacing and POV from the first three chapters, all this complexity is exhausting.
Where did the inspiration for Exordia come from?
I shit you not it came from Legos again. I wrote a Lego Bionicle fanfiction in high school, about the Bionicle action figure island being invaded by aliens. As an adult I tried rewriting that story except the aliens were invading the contemporary Earth, circa 2012. But the resulting novel was not good enough to submit. Then, once I’d become a published short fiction writer, I redid part of that story as a short story, “Anna Saves Them All”. Then I rewrote that again as a novel and that’s EXORDIA. There are quite a few differences from the short story to the novel — they don’t really fit inside the same continuity.
Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
Oh, I think it’s obvious even from the first chapter, Anna and Ssrin are the highlight. The fucked up 30something Kurdish genocide survivor and the snake alien. They bring out the worst in each other, Anna will moan about wanting to kill her ex boyfriend and Ssrin will go find her a handgun.
You’ve published several novels over the past decade. What are some of the key lessons you’ve learned when it comes to writing and the publishing world since your debut?
Don’t trust anyone! I mean this! Do not trust anyone. Do not confide in people you meet, do not share your vulnerabilities, do not ask for or provide favors, do not trust them. There is no such thing as a ‘science fiction and fantasy community’. There’s just a mess of grudges and subtweets and convention drama (god save us from conventions) and callouts and exhausting boundary-blurring between professional and fan and personal realms. Groping, in the literal physical sense, and in the metaphorical sense too—private and public demands that you disclose details of your personal life and identity, as if you’ve got it all figured out at age 25. And if you don’t meet those demands people will just make shit up about you and publish it, as if daring you to come out and make a fuss about it.
It is a mess that induces morally incompetent behavior in normally decent people. I’ve met many wonderful people in this line of work, some of whom I consider dear friends—it’s not that there are no good people in writing and publishing—but the whole mess, the whole environment, causes a kind of ethical enervation that just makes people, even good people, do awful things.
You don’t need to be part of ‘the community’ in order to do good work. You will not find your people or enter a thriving conversation or any of the other dreams you might hold. There is nothing in this dank messy cave worth dying for. Tend your own relationships in your own spaces and stay out of the septic fray. You’ll be so happy you didn’t engage.
(I talk to a lot of debut authors and a running theme is ‘the point in your debut experience where you consider suicide’. I know this sounds kind of ridiculous. What could be so bad about publishing a book? Apparently something. That experience was ultimately positive for me, in that it got me started on antidepressants which have really helped my life. Others never write again.)
What’s next for you?
A lot of day job and freelance work, and the fourth Baru Cormorant novel, which I must get out of my head. I’ve tried several times but never liked the results. It’s in there like a breech baby and I must get it out. But I keep delivering the breech baby and deciding it’s not right and putting it back in for another go around.
With it being the new year, are you setting any goals or resolutions for 2024?
God. I have this rowing machine I was using semi regularly, and then I got COVID and stopped using it, and I need to get back on it. I was listening to the whole Aubrey-Maturin series by Patrick O’Brian while I rowed, imagining I was a pathetic British boatboy. I don’t know what I’ll do when I run out of boat books.
Lastly, are there any 2024 book releases that you’re looking forward to?
I was oddly charmed by Artifact Space by Miles Cameron. I usually don’t like books where a lonely character finds a community and proves her worth, because in my experience reality doesn’t go that way, but I just couldn’t resist this one. So I am excited for the Artifact Space sequel.
I’ve been reading a lot of older stuff, horror and cosmic horror, so a lot of the books I’m excited to read this year aren’t new releases. I’m sorry I’m so out of the loop! Sorry to any friends with books coming out that I should be hyping.
