“Sentient Plants, Artificial Intelligence, and Fippokats”

[mount_oregano]

Alex Kingsley has interviewed me about the Semiosis trilogy for Interstellar Flight Magazine. You can read the interview here.

Alex asked: In Usurpation, there’s a pandemic. Was this pandemic inspired by our real-life pandemic? How did COVID-19 affect your portrayal?

I answered: In the 1980s, I was covering HIV as a journalist, and one day before a meeting, I was chatting with the Wisconsin state epidemiologist. He explained that while AIDs was awful — and as a gay man, he knew exactly how terrifying and destructive it was — a different new disease could be a lot worse. He described the many ways in which it could be easier to transmit, harder to detect, more resistant to treatment, and more deadly. COVID wasn’t my first pandemic, it wasn’t the worst, and it wasn’t at all inspiring.