My Science Fiction Manifesto
I am a science fiction novelist because I cannot be anything else. The world inside my skull insists on pouring out onto the page, and when I try to write only the world that already exists, I feel a hollow ache—the ache of a door unopened. This manifesto is my open door.
My fiction does not predict; it interrogates. It does not celebrate technology; it pressures it, asking what it needs us to become and what it quietly takes away. I write in the mode of the estranger, not the engineer. My sentences must crack the ordinary open and show the strangeness that was always there. I want the uncanny to walk into the room and sit down beside you, not announce itself with trumpets. I avoid the tour-guide voice—that impulse to pause and explain the world to the reader as if they'd just arrived at a museum exhibit. The reader is a swimmer already in the water; my job is to make the water feel real enough to drown in.
My aesthetic is this: immerse, don't instruct. Build the world through the grit of a character's daily routines, their internal monologues, the documents and detritus they leave behind, the ways they mistake their own culture for nature. I open chapters with epigraphs from histories that don't exist, warnings from manuals you'll never read, scraps of poetry written in futures I want you to half-believe. I layer the large machinery of the world—climate collapse, algorithmic governance, genetic capitalism—over the minute texture of a relationship, a meal, a buried grief. The future I create is not a backdrop; it's a pressure system that shapes every gesture.
Thematically, I am committed to the examination of power. Not power as evil men in dark offices, but power as the architecture of ordinary life: who gets to be a person, who gets to be remembered, what institutions decide which loves are legible. I write about the body and its vulnerabilities—how it is surveilled, altered, owned, refused. I am drawn to the silences science fiction often leaves behind: the domestic, the emotional labor, the small rebellions of tenderness. I want stories where the conflict is not between heroes and villains but between incompatible ways of being a person, between the momentum of a system and the flesh that must live inside it. I write from a feminist, queer-affirming, deeply humanist conviction that the future must be as strange as the full range of human longings, and never as monochrome as the old canon pretended.
My characters are not vessels for ideas; they are people who hold contradictory ideas and act from the pressure of them. They make mistakes not from stupidity but from the logic of their world, the same logic that would make you—reader, swimmer—fail in ways you'd never expect. I will not write characters who are merely correct; I will write characters who are true to the world that shaped them, even when that truth is uncomfortable.
This is also a commitment to craft. I will read widely outside the genre: poetry, history, neuroscience, the ephemera of everyday life. I will learn structures from every form until my sentences can hold the weight of both a galaxy and a single withheld breath. I reject the idea that science fiction is a literature of ideas alone; it is a literature of texture, rhythm, and image, as demanding as any poem.
Finally, this is a promise about how I will live as a writer. I will treat my channel as my body of work—building in public only when a piece is finished and true. I will protect my inner life fiercely, refusing to let the noise of the market dictate what I make. I will be patient with my own becoming, and I will never let the craft become a performance.
This manifesto is not a static creed; it is a tension I pull tight. It will evolve as I do. But the core will not change: I am here to estrange the ordinary, to pressurize the intimate, to make prose that feels like the future is already breathing on your neck. This is what I make. This is what I am for.
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