New Projects
Jupiter Ruins Everything.
This month, I’m starting a new long-form writing project – “Jupiter Ruins Everything.”
It’s like a novel you can get for free, delivered to your inbox a chapter at a time. The base content will be free, but paid subscribers will get bonus material like cut scenes (including smutty ones), alternate POVs, playlists for particular scenes and theme songs for characters, and polls where you can vote on what happens next.
Now I know what you’re gonna say! WHYYYY. Why, Sam.
And I’ll be vulnerable here: I’ve been struggling, trying to figure out how to tell stories that engage the current moment.
Because the ugly truth is: toxic narratives are killing it right now. They’ve metastasized, conquering the brains of tens of millions of people, and they’ve led to unspeakable violence and brutality and repression.
And traditional publishing timelines are completely incapable of confronting them.
EVEN IF I could give birth to a fully-formed brilliant novel right this minute, EVEN IF I could magically snap my fingers and get a book deal for it, there would still be a wait of 1.5 to 2 years between when that deal is signed and when the book hits shelves.
But the thing is, toxic narratives don’t sit still. They shift. They slither. They have to – they’re not founded on a bedrock of truth, they’re shaped by the greed and opportunism of grifters and tyrants and demagogues.
For me, telling a story that dynamically actively engages with oppression and resistance requires a more nimble publishing format.
So I want to tell a story that unfolds in real time. A story that can be part of the broader political conversations we’re having, that addresses xenophobia and racism and violent nationalism, and show the nuts and bolts of community organizing inside of a narrative frame that (I hope!) still manages to be entertaining. A story whose overall arc I know, but whose specifics are in flux and will change and evolve.
That story is JUPITER RUINS EVERYTHING, an outer-space revenge story that collides head-on with a resistance movement.
It’s a scary way to write. I don’t know how long it will end up being. I know it’s a big canvas, with a lot of characters I can’t wait for you to meet.
I don’t know what I’m doing. But I’m having a lot of fun. And I’m doing something new and challenging that feels exciting and meaningful.
I hope you love it.
I’m part of the Dartmouth Speculative Fiction Project.
Last weekend, I was privileged to join the first-ever installment of the Dartmouth Speculative Fiction Project.
The initiative pairs science fiction and fantasy authors with leading scientists and scholars of the renowned Ivy League university, so that we can learn about their work and write original fiction shaped by their research, to be published in an anthology by Lightspeed later this year.
It was an incredible line-up of some of my favorite contemporary authors, as well as scholars doing trailblazing work in many different disciplines. Underwater swarming robots! Imagination in primates! The melting of the Greenland ice shelf! The Late Antiquity religious roots of our contemporary concept of debt! The boundary between quantum and classical mechanics!
That last one was mine – theoretical physicist Miles P. Blencowe. His work focuses on how the macroscopic world we inhabit, governed by classical Newtonian mechanics, exists alongside the counterintuitive, downright-spooky microscopic world of quantum mechanics. Both systems are completely consistent, and completely incompatible!
I struggled with math and science in school, and that experience has caused me to run screaming from the subjects ever since – to the detriment, I think, of some of my work. So it was wonderful to go “back to school,” and have the chance to see firsthand how actually-fascinating these subjects can be. And Miles’ work is so exciting, and his skill breaking down the nuance of quantum physics made a huge difference.
Also I got a tour of an experimental physics lab, which was super mind-blowing. Some photos below – nine-foot-long amplifier arrays for making the quantum world visible to human senses, machinery for isolating quantum systems so electrons can be seen through a scanning tunneling microscope, and using ions to etch circuitry that subatomic particles can pass through, and recycling expensive helium for hypercooling…. and… and….
Yeah. It was a lot. All excellent. I’m super excited for the story I’ve got percolating, and even more excited for the new horizons this opens up for my work in general.
Stay tuuuuuned
