The Starlight Watchmaker and The Deep-Sea Duke are being published today in America with Union Square Books , so I thought I’d reshare an essay I wrote in 2019 about them.

The sci-fi genre can be incredibly hard to get into for new readers. Books tend to be 500+ pages long, with lots of dense science facts and made-up terminology that’s been developed by generations of writers over the year (see: artificial gravity, terraforming, parallel universe, hive mind).

I wanted to write a more readable story that still uses all of my favourite sci-fi elements – there are hints of Binti, Jeeves & Wooster, Starfleet Academy from Star Trek, Saga, Howl’s Moving Castle and The Watchmaker of Filigree Street.

This novella is designed to be a jumping-off point to help readers explore the whole canon of sci-fi, hopefully while feeling like there might be a place for them in the genre, after all.

This is nothing like my usual science fiction novels. It’s not based in science at all. There’s not even a human in the story. It’s full of sentient volcanoes, bicycle-riding-butterflies, clockwork birds and golden gears and cogs. I hope that it feels as magical to you as it did to me, while I was writing it. And if you’ve not read much sci-fi before, I hope this encourages you to give the genre a try.

I want to write a sequel set on Dorian’s underwater planet – I have a plot already planned out, so fingers crossed I get chance to write it! Hugo and Dorian’s relationship still has a lot more story to tell.

I want to speak a bit about Barrington Stoke, and the amazing work they do. For their readable books, they work to make sure that sentence structure is chronological and easy to understand, there are plenty of dialogue markers to make the speaker obvious, and there isn’t any complicated formatting.

As an example, there’s one of the (many!) rounds of edits this book went through.

Each word was analysed carefully several times to make sure it was the best choice. At the end, it still feels like my writing voice, which is an incredible feat! I feel really lucky to have been able to work with Barrington Stoke on this

Fancast –

Hugo (voice)  – Eddie Redmayne

Dorian (voice) – Jack Farthing

Ada (voice) – Phoebe Waller-Bridge

Playlist –

Campus//Vampire Weekend

Like Real People Do//Hozier

Death of a Bachelor//Panic! at the Disco

When the Party’s Over//Kina Grannis

Nominated for the Carnegie medal 2020

Shortlisted for the STEAM Children’s Book Prize 2020

Coventry Inspiration Book Awards 2021 winner

“A charmingly wrought story for reluctant readers that explores social class divisions in an intergalactic setting.” – Kirkus Reviews

Wealthy students from across the galaxy come to learn at the prestigious academy where Hugo toils as a watchmaker. But he is one of the lucky ones. Many androids like him are jobless and homeless. Someone like Dorian could never understand their struggle – or so Hugo thinks when the pompous duke comes banging at his door. But when Dorian’s broken time-travel watch leads them to discover a sinister scheme, the pair must reconcile their differences if they are to find the culprit in time.

A wildly imaginative sci-fi adventure from YA star Wren James, particularly suitable for struggling, reluctant or dyslexic readers aged 13+.

Goodreads

Amazon UK

Book Depository

Waterstones

Foyles

Wordery

Barnes & Noble

The Starlight Watchmaker is a 20,000 word novella published in paperback and eBook by Barrington Stoke in the UK and Union Square Books in the US (April 2025). The sequel The Deep-Sea Duke is out now. Read the first chapter here.

With World Book Day coming up, I thought I’d share some info about my available workshops and talks. I’m very happy to visit schools and universities, either in person or via Zoom, to discuss writing, queer representation, using real science in stories, and how to engage hopefully with climate issues. 

I visit schools very regularly, and the teachers often report back on how enthusiastic my talks get the students about science. One teacher recently said I gave the best talk they’d ever had. 🙂

If you’re a teacher and you’re interested in arranging a visit, shoot me an email at wrenjameswriter at gmail dot com. I’m also available for bookings through Authors Aloud.

Available talks and workshops for Secondary Schools:

‘True Crime Thrills and Cold Case Conspiracies’ talk – Join Wren James on a journey into the world of internet detectives who set out to solve real-life crimes online. Find out about the real true crime inspirations for their murder mystery novel Last Seen Online and learn how they craft the perfect plot twists and spine-tingling thrills in their writing. (1 hour, any number of students)

‘Writing with STEM’ talk – Wren James talks about their writing, with a focus specifically on how they came to write science fiction after studying Chemistry and Physics at Masters level. They discuss how scientific research from their university studies inspired events in their novels. They share spreadsheets used to accurately calculate the figures involved in their writing, such as spaceship travel times and time travel figures. The talk includes discussion of climate change, Einstein’s theory of relativity, extinction and evolution, all talked about in an enthusiastic, easy-to-understand way. Includes a Q&A session. (1 hour, any number of students)

‘World-building’ writing workshop – A group exercise using pictures of real world locations to write a story. Students will use their senses to create atmosphere and setting, building out a story from the location. It includes examples taken from writing Wren did at the age of 18, which later became part of their debut novel. (1 hour, less than 40 students, years 6-9)

Science fiction writing workshop – a group exercise about writing science fiction based on articles in the news. We will choose a recent news topic based on a scientific subject and use the ideas and concepts to create an engaging story. It will teach students how to research science online, and be creative with a typically factual subject. (1 hour, less than 40 students, year 7 and up)

Climate Change in Fiction – a workshop about researching climate change solutions and politics in order to create a hopeful, optimistic story about the future of Earth. (1 hour, less than 40 students). There is a version of this workshop aimed at Years 7-9, or a more academic version of this workshop available for older year groups from Year 12 to university level

Available workshops for older students (Year 12 – University level):

Writing Diversely –  an explanation of the core concepts of diversity in writing, and a guided group discussion about why it is important for writers of all kinds to make their work inclusive. Students will learn how to research identities and avoid stereotypes, using case studies and examples of diverse works in Young Adult fiction. We will research a diverse identity for a piece of fiction. (1- 2 hours, less than 40 students) – read a review of this workshop by University of Nottingham here

Climate Change in Fiction – a workshop about researching climate change solutions and politics in order to create a hopeful, optimistic story about the future of Earth. (1 hour, less than 40 students) – watch part of this lecture here or here

Building a Bestseller – a guided workshop turning a story idea into an outline and pitch ready for agent submission. We will discuss plot development, narrative structures and beats, common errors in opening scenes and formatting a synopsis (2 hours, less than 40 students)

Working professionally with agents – a breakdown of the author-agent relationship, and explanation of how to find a shortlist of agents which will suit different projects. We will work on the language used in writing short pitches, author biographies and query letters, focusing on ways to improve your submission and draw out the commercial elements of the plot. We will also discuss how to self-edit your work, and choose an extract of your project to send out. NB: students will need a rough idea of their project for the activities, or they can use their favourite novel as an example, e.g. Harry Potter (1 – 2 hours, less than 40 students)

Working with publishers – an explanation of the process of editing with a publisher, with guided exercises in editing a chapter extract, swapping work and line-editing each other’s writing using Microsoft Word tracked changes and comments. NB: students will need to bring a scene or short story along to edit (1 – 2 hours, less than 40 students)

School, university or library visits, or talks via Zoom/Skype/Google Hangouts, can be arranged by contacting me at wrenjameswriter@gmail.com or fill out this form with the details of your proposed event.

My prices are available here, and you can access a Canva template to make a poster for the event here.

Whenever I’m asked how I write, my immediate response is always: using outlines! I can’t write a single word without a detailed plan – sometimes reaching lengths of ten or more pages. When I’m not trying to keep control of the entire plot in place in my head, it frees up mental space to think about what comes next, to consider what I can lose and what’s missing.

I pour every single thing I know about my story onto the page, explaining explicitly what I want the underlying message to be; how the characters will interact and how that changes over the course of the book; how and when I will foreshadow plot points; the reasons for my worldbuilding choices, as well as how they will influence the plot. If specific scenes or conversations jump out to me as being particularly important, I recount these too. This is not the place to draw out tension and intrigue – this is the place for clear, simple explanations that cover the depth of the story in full.

An outline is absolutely vital for distilling what I want to do with a story down to its core essence. I can’t write a book if I don’t understand what I’m trying to do with it – where is the tension leading? What will give this an ultimatum, an emotional pay-off? What is the tone of the writing? What are the weak points of the characters’ relationship dynamics?

This is my starting point – from here, I can look at it as a whole narrative, and analyse plotlines and character development. I beta-test bold plot ideas by making changes to my outline and following the implications and adjustments to be made through the whole novel. It becomes a simple matter of changing a sentence or two in the outline to see if a plot change might work, rather than revising a bulky novel many times over.

Using my outline as a blueprint and a map, I can see what I need to keep – but also what is missing. What kinds of conversations could help convey information about backstory or worldbuilding to the reader? What is really important for them to understand, and what can I withhold and leave to their imagination?

Then, I begin to write. As I approach each scene, I already know why it’s important to the plot. With all the difficult questions answered, it is frequently a joyful and natural process to sit down to write each day. It leads to constant surprises, as the writing processes enriches and develops what was planned. I go down roads I’d never even noticed on my map. And, most importantly, I know what danger zones to avoid along my journey.

Last June I was commissioned by the West Midlands Readers Network to meet with Warwickshire Pride’s book club and quiz them about what they’d like to read the most. I then went away and wrote a short story to fit their demands!

They wanted to read about trans+, poly characters in their twenties and thirties, and requested ‘vampire smut’ and spooky elements. I ended up writing a story about a group of trans housemates living in a Victorian terrace which is haunted. The story, T-Boys, has been published in an anthology FIVE STORIES.

We’re launching the anthology with a panel at Leamington Spa Library on 19th March at 7.30pm, alongside contributors Ania Bas and Kate Mascarhenas. Everyone who comes along will get a copy of the anthology!

This project was funded by Arts Council England. Thanks to David and the Warwickshire Pride Book Club for their enthusiasm and excellent ideas!

I’m also very excited that Future Hopes is a Book Trust Spark reading pick! The 15 titles were picked by a panel of librarians and teachers to represent the best of modern fiction for shared reading in KS3 students.

The best advice I’ve been given as a writer always comes from my agent. She reads my first drafts in their truly terrible initial form. Every time she identifies a key weakness in my writing, whether that’s making sure each scene serves a purpose, varying my sentence structure more imaginatively, or avoiding describing all of the physical movements my characters make. These pieces of advice become keystones as I edit and draft new stories.

The advice that’s stuck with me the most is to ensure that readers feel empathy for my characters. If they aren’t invested in the protagonist, then even the most exciting action scenes with dangerous high-risk stakes are going to feel meaningless.

Characters need to be three-dimensional, engaging and human. By the end of the first chapter, we should understand what kind of person they are, what they want, and what they need.

Draw from real life. Not by stealing someone’s personality wholesale, but by taking pieces here and there – your mother’s worst fear, your best friend’s guilty secret, or your co-worker’s annoying habit.

You are searching for the emotional truth behind these quirks – what does this reveal about this person? The fact that your mother is afraid of scam calls isn’t because she’s scared of the ringing landline. It could be because she has been tricked and taken in by fraud in the past, and is terrified of letting that happen again. She is aware of her own gullibility.

By seeding in this one small detail, you lay the groundwork for a whole novel’s worth of character development. You are showing that the character has a complex inner life beyond what is necessary for the action. This builds out from the core storyline to create a world that feels fully inhabited by real people, not just paper cut-outs being moving around where the author guides them.

Remember, the details of specific incidents are less important than finding out what that means for the character. We don’t need to know the specifics of the scam that the side character fell for, but knowing that they did fall for it tells us a lot about them as a person.

The quickest way to alienate a reader is to have a character who makes poor decisions without explaining why they do those things. Even a reckless character needs to react in ways which feel plausible.

We want to see them work hard, and fail. If success comes too easily for them, then we won’t feel satisfaction. Events should have consequences, so that we feel emotionally invested. You could have a very complicated fantasy world, with an intricate magic system, but it won’t mean anything unless we understand the cost of using magic, emotionally or physically.

Think about what your characters fear, love and keep secret. Are they a hero or a villain? Who do they trust? What makes them laugh? What makes them wince? If they have a love interest, is their mutual attraction based in real, long-term factors of connection and compatibility?

Write a person, and the rest becomes easy. Once we’re invested in their personal journey, the plot can take us anywhere and we’ll happily tag along for the ride.

Dianna Wynne Jones. Lois McMaster Bujold. Susannah Clarke. Madeline Miller. Mary Robinette Kowal. N. K. Jemisin. Naomi Novik. Becky Chambers. Ursula K Le Guin. Just a few of the female authors of science fiction and fantasy who’ve crafted the genre into what it is today.

Science fiction has been sculpted by women, from Margaret Cavendish’s early Utopian novel The Blazing-World, written in 1666, to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein from 1818, all the way to Verity Lambert’s work as the founding producer on Doctor Who in 1963.

I have a fascination with female creativity, especially when it interrogates personhood and identity through the lens of fantasy. In The Blazing World, Cavendish created a utopian world, accessible through the North Pole, where the female protagonist had the freedom to behave as she wished without social division. The writer was imagining a better world, where being a woman didn’t restrict the choices she could make – something that truly would have seemed fantastical in the seventeenth century.

In Frankenstein, Shelley examined human nature through the creation of a living creature. She used this fantastical guise to interrogate how society treats someone whose existence falls outside the bounds of acceptable behaviour.

Women have been using art to explore their place in the world for millennia. Some of the earliest forms of artistic sculpture are the Venus figurines, which have been unearthed across Europe. Over two hundred stone carvings of female bodies have been found, usually around thirty thousand years old, though sometimes over half a million years old.

These beguiling sculptures have distorted body shapes; with exaggerated, distended torsos and a noticeable lack of arms, legs, or faces. Often painted with ochre to match skin tones, and carved with plaits of hair, it’s believed that they were sculpted by women looking down at their own bodies and trying to recreate what they saw.

However uncanny and disorientating they may be, there’s something irresistibly charming about the misshapen figurines. Their commonness implies that hundreds of thousands of years ago, women cared about who they were as individuals. They lived in a society where that mattered; where their identity and appearance affected their social interactions. They took the time to study their own bodies because they wanted to compare themselves to the people they knew. They were constructing their own self-images. Chipping away at their identities, one flake of stone at a time.

So much of women’s voices and interiority is lost from the history we are told of humanity, but from the earliest days, female creativity has been a driving force in culture. Women have left records of themselves in any way that they can. Innovation and art is tied to womanhood in a way that can’t be separated, from sculpture, to creating the novel form in Japan one thousand years ago, to writing the earliest science fiction novels.

In The Blazing World, Margaret Cavendish was asking some of the same questions as the woman who carved the Venus of Willendorf. Who am I? Do I matter? How do I fit into the society around me? How does my appearance and gender change the way I’m treated?

Modern science fiction writers continue to ask those questions. In the 2015 Broken Earth trilogy – which set records by winning ‘Best Novel’ at the Hugo Awards for each novel in the series – N. K. Jemisin masterfully imagines a far-future society where repeated apocalyptic events have wiped out most human knowledge. This has created a world with little sexism, where the female characters are unimpeded by their gender.

The Broken Earth trilogy asks the same question raised in Frankenstein: what elements of human behaviour are social constructs which must be taught to new generations? And what would a world look like without our society’s worst negative traits?

In the sprawling Vorkosigan Saga, which Lois McMaster Bujold has been writing since 1986, a different kind of future is created. Here, society has reverted to a medieval state which keeps women under tight control. In a high-tech, far-future setting, where humans have colonised the galaxy, one planet is cut off from the universe. It devolves into a feudalistic world with incredibly backwards social norms. If The Blazing World invented a magical utopia for women, then this is quite the opposite.

The people on the isolated planet have no understanding of another way of life. When they reconnect with the rest of the galaxy, their feminist, liberal politics shatter their cultural beliefs.

In Susannah Clarke’s 2020 novel Piranesi, which won the Women’s prize for fiction, a man with no memory lives alone in a flooded labyrinth of halls. He keeps a diary of the knowledge he has gathered about his small world, as he carves out an understanding of who he might be. He doesn’t have any concept of his own personhood, because he has no society to reflect his image back at him.

Victor Frankenstein warned, “Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.”

Knowledge of the world changes the way it is experienced. What is science fiction if not a vehicle to examine the world we live in, and ask: how would I be different if I lived somewhere else? On a spaceship in the future; in a world hidden at the North Pole; in a flooded vestibule? And how can I create that desired world, in fiction and in real life?

As a writer, my science fiction centres the female experience. I’ve been writing since I was sixteen, and over time my ideas, personal identity and desires have evolved. The worlds I create reflect this, whether consciously or not. Writing is a cathartic, intimate process – for genre fiction as much as memoir or poetry.

For me, reading science fiction by the great female minds of the genre feels like coming home. It tells me: you’re safe here. Your experiences are valued. And the worlds we’ve created together will have a place for you. Always.

Arthur C Clarke once said that, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

As a science fiction writer, I can confirm that this is true. Most of my story ideas come from intriguing scientific theories which have caught my attention. Whether that’s a hypothesis for how time travel might be feasible using black holes, or a test of sentience on Artificial Intelligences. So much inspiration for science fiction can be found in science fact.

But in that slippery, transmutable way that inspiration often has, my ideas switch up on me. My carefully researched science often transforms into magic during the writing process.

When a story is set in the far-future, technology is so distinct from our current capabilities that it might as well be wizardry. We can’t create cryogenic chambers for space travel any more easily than we could cast an age-freezing enchantment.

In Jurassic Park, dinosaurs are brought back from extinction using samples of blood taken from ancient mosquitos trapped in amber. Of course, this is impossible. It’s nothing more than loosely justified necromancy. But there’s a logic behind it, that we can almost believe in. Enough to suspend our disbelief, sit back and enjoy the story.

In the same way, well-constructed fictional magic systems have logic behind their mystique. Magic requires an input of energy (blood, a firstborn child, a true name). There’s a technical process (a spell, a ritual, a potion) which exerts a force (an enchantment, a transformation, a curse).

A witch stirring newt guts into a cauldron to create a homunculus is indistinguishable from a programmer encoding an algorithm to create a sentient robot. Neither exists in the real world, so on the page it’s absolutely crucial for both processes to be believable.

In The Glamourist Histories by Mary Robinette Kowal, magic users can manipulate light to create glamours of colour in the air. The magic is informed by the real behaviour of light, which limits what the characters can do. However, the author’s commitment to the laws of physics also leads in surprising directions. The light glamours are used in medicine, since ultra-violet light can be used to sterilise wounds.

It can be tempting to justify the rules of your magic with real science, but you can’t explain everything – and you shouldn’t try. Some things are better left mysterious to avoid bogging down the story with unnecessary exposition. As the creator, I have to research the science behind my fictional time machines, robots and spaceships, but only so I know how much I can get away with. As long as I don’t break the thread of logic, the reader will trust that it works. The theorem doesn’t need to be proven. Sorcery can be left to the imagination.

The best fiction exists in that fuzzy boundary between magic and science. Star Wars is a science fiction universe, but the Jedi lightsabers are pure magic. In His Dark Materials, a world of witches and talking polar bears has a plot which hinges on real life dark matter and physics.

This intersection of seemingly conflicting areas of study has always enraptured me. In my novel The Reckless Afterlife of Harriet Stoker, a community of immortal ghosts exist according to strict laws of energy conservation and physics. Ghosts use their own life force to cast spells. Once their energy is used up, they disintegrate.

For every action in nature, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Power has side effects. Whether we call it nuclear energy or magic, it still takes resources from the environment. It will pollute or destroy natural resources. It will have ethical and moral implications, like genetic modification or pesticides in real life.

Power is always a valuable commodity in society. Just as technology can be easily attainable, or rare and inaccessible, so can magic. Resources can be hoarded by a magician in their tower, or a billionaire on Twitter. It can be every-day and unremarkable, like flicking on a light switch, or world-ending, like setting off a bomb.

Characters can be born with a natural gift for algebra or alchemy, or – more interestingly – they can struggle to learn their skills the hard way. Whether they use a tablet or a wand, the writer can make them work for what they need.

In my novel Green Rising, a mutation in teenagers makes magical plants grow from their skin. I was inspired by the fungal network that links the roots of trees – the ‘wood wide web’ – and allows plants to communicate.

My teen characters use their plant magic to build a network of people fighting to slow climate change. The grassroots activists connect together to reforest the world, committing acts of civil disobedience which unearth the status quo. Their magic has some downsides – it sucks nutrients from their bone marrow – but it gives them the power to create change.

Magic is a political tool, changing society in the same way that technical innovations can create revolution. Like, electricity, cars, and the internet, magic is morally neutral. But it can be wielded for good, evil, or something in-between.

In Green Rising, magic is wielded scientifically to rewild the Earth. In my novel The Quiet at the End of the World, I did the opposite. I used science to cast a magical spell. At the beginning of the story, humans are made sterile by a global pandemic. Desperate to avoid extinction, the last generation works together to create AI offspring which are functionally human in everything but biology. After time, the origin of these computer-coded children is forgotten. They are human, no different from the generations that came before them. The magic spell which created them is lost to time.

A nuclear waste storage site will turn into a mysterious glowing cave, given enough time. Science becomes magic with distance. Only our understanding of the process changes its definition.

Arthur C Clarke told us that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. But in the hands of a writer, all magic has the potential to become technology. And politics. And ethics. And economics. And character development. Magic is the perfect vehicle for storytelling. It’s whatever we need it to be.

During the summer holidays at the age of sixteen, I spent a heavenly six weeks grinding freeze-dried honeybees into powder in one of Warwick University’s science labs. I’d captured the bees myself, bedecked in a white suit and mask, from a local beekeeper’s wildflower meadow hives.

Once they were thoroughly decimated with a pestle and mortar, the powdered insects were poured into vials so their DNA could be extracted. I wanted to track down the honeybees’ origins. Not their recent Warwickshire origins, but their deep-time, historic ancestry.

Cells are time capsules. In every cell of every creature, there’s a remnant of leftover DNA in the mitochondria. This is an archaic artefact of evolution – the mitochondria was once its own living organism, which was engulfed by a larger cell back in times of prehistory.

Unlike typical DNA chains, which are mixed and matched each generation to take sequences from both parents, the mitochondria’s DNA is fixed. It stays the same between mother and offspring, generation after generation.

A honeybee today has the same mitochondrial DNA as one living ten thousand years ago. Except for a few little mutations here and there, which spring up at random, and are passed on to the next generation.

These mutations in sequencing are very useful for tracking where honeybees have come from. If a bee in Croatia and a bee in Derby have the same mutation – an A swapped to a G, or a C swapped to a T – then at some point in their history, those two bees had a common ancestor. This lets us create a family tree of bee populations throughout time, stretching as far back as the earliest honey queen, the biblical Eve of bees.

I wanted to work on the honeybee project – despite the macabre bee-killing I’d have to endure – because I’ve always been interested in communications across time. It’s harder than you might think to decode messages from the past. Often the DNA inside our cells is easier to understand than an actual message left by a living, breathing human being.

Hidden in the darkness of caves across Europe are masterpieces of ice age art, which have survived for tens of thousands of years. These enigmatic drawings of horses, deer and mammoths remain mysterious, even after decades of study. It was only early in 2023 that an amateur detective decoded some of the markings carved into the rock. The parallel lines etched next to different animal drawings are now through to be calendars showing the number of months after spring in which each species gave birth.

We don’t understand most of the messages left by those long-dead artists, but we could easily sequence their mitochondrial DNA from a bone fragment to determine which of the ‘daughters of Eve’ they descended from, tracking their lineage back to our most recent common ancestor, who lived in the earliest human tribes some two hundred thousand years ago.

I’ve always loved the idea of having an undisturbed time capsule hidden inside my cells. A message inherited from that early ‘Eve’. It was the inspiration for an early story of mine, written when I was undertaking my honeybee detective work.

Science has always been linked to my creative writing. Inspired by my research into ancestry, I wrote The Quiet at the End of the World about aglobal pandemic which makes humans infertile. The last generation is devastated by the knowledge that the human race is going to go extinct. As their cities and skyscrapers start to empty, the endlings must decide what kinds of time capsules they want to leave behind for the future, like that early Eve’s mitochondrial DNA.

Humans have carved our place on Earth’s surface, from ice age art to the ridges and furrows left by ancient farming. A layer of plastic fossilised in the rock. A significant quantity of Coca-Cola-branded litter and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Our legacy is often not something to be proud of, which is part of what makes it so compelling to write about. How do you write a story about humanity which encompasses everything we’ve done to this planet, in a way that showcases the best of us rather than the worst?

It’s possible that if we did go extinct, there would one day be another species which evolved to become sentient enough to examine our remains. Octopi, corvids and dolphins are all highly intelligent in their own ways. To those future interspecies archaeologists, humans would just be one of the thousands of fossilised species buried underground.

Five million years ago, the oceans were filled with an explosion of exotic and alien creatures. These Cambrian-era beasts had unusual body parts – armour plating; extendable, dynamic trunks; protruding eyes on tendons. Their fossils appear fantastical and implausible; aliens from an imaginative science fiction novel. But they existed. Once, they were our ancestors.

Five million years from now, our descendants could marvel at the mysteries of homo sapiens skeletons. They might attempt to badly recreate our image from the fossils, as we do with dinosaurs.

In The Quiet at the End of the World, I suggest that the human line will continue after our extinction through children built with robot bodies and computer-programmed intelligence. Those artificial offspring forget their original, biological origins and live as humans. Mathematical, technological people.

Science is often the only thing which can survive over long distances of time. Five thousand years ago, the South American Incas communicated through ‘quipu’ – a complex system of knotted strings. This medium remained untranslated until 2017, when one example was decoded by comparing the knots to the numerical data in a seventeenth century Spanish census document from the same time period. Just like that early ice-age animal reproductive calendar, the message was decoded through maths. Numbers stay fixed while language marches on with each new generation, ever shifting.

We’ve learnt from this. The messages we leave for the future are now mathematical. When the Hoover Dam was built in 1935, a terrazzo floor was inlaid with the orientation of the stars at the time of its installation.

When NASA launched the Voyager spacecraft in 1977, they included a golden record engraved with a diagram of a hydrogen atom. Something intergalactically translatable, which aliens would be able to interpret. An immutable fact recognisable through any form of intelligence. Octopus, crow, or otherwise.

Today, we’re still trying to find ways to leave complicated messages for far-future generations, so that we can mark out places of significance. The doomsday Svalbard Global Seed Vault or a nuclear waste storage site. Places to visit or avoid at all costs.

How do you warn someone of danger when they don’t speak your language? When it’s likely that any message you leave will become untranslatable within a few thousand years? If the ice-age cave art or Inca quipu had been used to warn us of the dangers of radiation waste, it’s likely we wouldn’t be able to heed their warnings.

The semiotics of these messages is the topic of much debate. It’s a good starting point for a story, too. The best science fiction takes an outlandish idea – like an alien octopus trying hopelessly to decode the message ‘WHAT IS HERE WAS DANGEROUS AND REPULSIVE TO US’, carved on the stone wall of a mysterious glowing chamber – and uses it to cast some light on the intricacies of human nature.

As a writer, I aim to write books about the core traits and desires which unite us as a species. I find common goals that connect people who lived a thousand years ago, with those who will live a thousand years into the future.

The NASA scientists who launched the Voyager had the same goal as the people who carved the Uffington White Horse out of chalk on a hillside, three-thousand years ago.

They wanted to leave something indelible behind for the future. Something that could be understood.

All forms of writing are messages left for the future. Our stories and poems are a way of reaching out and asking to be understood. A time capsule preserving as much of our consciousness as we can transcribe, outside the realms of DNA or Artificial Intelligence.

Writing is a connection from one mind to another. A record that says: I was here. I existed. I created. Remember me.

Hi, Wren! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?

I’m a queer writer of science fiction and thrillers from the Midlands in the UK. I’ve been writing since I got a book deal in my last year of university. Originally I planned to just write for a ‘gap year’ and then get a real job, but I’ve been on the gap year for a decade now!

My sci-fi novel The Loneliest Girl in the Universe is being made into a movie with Amazon MGM, and I also work in the writer’s room for the TV show Heartstopper. These days, alongside writing I do a lot of volunteer activism work – I host a queer writers workshop series in my hometown and run a collective of climate fiction writers called the Climate Fiction Writers League.

All of my books tend to have a few themes in common: exploration of deep time; queer found families; unreliable narrators and lots of plot twists. My favourite hobby is to create loveable characters and then ruin their lives.

When did you first discover your love for writing and stories?

I’ve always been a huge reader – I used to go to my local library as a kid and borrow as many books as possible on my library card, my mum’s, my dad’s and my brother’s. I think I was a bit infamous there, because I’d go in with this big Mary Poppins carpet bag and fifty books a week would disappear inside it. I ate my way through the entire childrens section and started writing my own stories when the library couldn’t meet my insatiable needs.

Quick lightning round! Tell us:

• The first book you ever remember reading: The Magic Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton
• The one that made you want to become an author: The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman
• The one that you can’t stop thinking about: The Mars House by Natasha Pulley

Your latest novel, Last Seen Online, is out now! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?

Fame. Obsession. Revenge. Fandom. Hollywood.

What can readers expect?

An old TV show was cancelled abruptly when one of the stars was murdered by another. Now, a decade later, the convicted murderer’s godson is determined to prove his innocence. He recruits a girl at school, who’s obsessed with true crime podcasts, to help him solve the case. The only evidence they have is an old fandom blog that documented all of the actors movements at the time of the murder. If they can use that to prove his godfather is innocent, then he will be released from prison. But everyone involved has a lot of secrets and hidden motives – so it doesn’t go smoothly.

Where did the inspiration for Last Seen Online come from?

Back in 2018, my dad was in hospital for a triple heart bypass, and as a form of stress control I started writing this fake blog by a fangirl who was obsessed with a TV show. When I was a teenager, I read and reread The MsScribe Story, an essay published online about a huge drama that went down in early noughties Harry Potter fandom. I loved how many twists and turns there were, with catfishing and shifting allegiences and all sorts of fake accounts. You can’t even really trust the person writing the essay, because they have their own motives too. So I tried to do a short story in that format – a fan manifesto essay, with someone publishing these chapters about all the drama going down in their small, obsessive online community. Then in comments from the blog’s readers, people start disagreeing with the fan’s claims. It all spirals into this unreliable, delicious, chaotic insight into an internet subculture. And then there’s a murder, which makes it all even more fun.

Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?

I loved loved loved coming up with all the comments on the blog. They’re full of internet references, from the usernames of the commenters to the deep-cut fandom dramas they discuss. It was such a joy to pay homage to the Supernatural fandom (my pandemic obsession) and One Direction fandom, and Gaylor fandom, and a dozen others besides.

Can you tell us about any challenges you faced whilst writing and how you were able to overcome them?

It was the hardest book I’ve ever had to write, honestly. I didn’t make it easy for myself! I wrote the fan’s blog first, documenting the events of the murder, and then jumped to a decade into the future and wrote new chapters where someone else starts investigating the murder. There were all these layers of what the reader knew, what the fan knew, what the fan’s readers knew, what the actors knew, and what they all wanted people to believe had happened. I absolutely do not recommend writing a book about liars! It’s bad for your health!

What’s next for you?

Season 3 of Heartstopper is released on Netflix on October 3^rd. A character I created, Jack Maddox, is being played by Jonathan Bailey this season. I have a short comic about Maddox in Volume 5 of Heartstopper, out in September, illustrated by Alice Oseman. It’s truly delightful.

I’m also got another novel in the works with Walker Books, probably coming out in 2026, and I’m working on my first adult novel too. The Loneliest Girl in the Universe movie is a few years off at the moment, but that’s also very exciting!

Lastly, what books have you enjoyed so far this year and are there any that you can’t wait to get your hands on?

I loved Moonbound by Robin Sloan – an interesting take on language model AIs gaining sentience and becoming obsessed with the kind of plot archetypes they were trained on. It’s a homage to Arthurian legends and the Green Knight, with bonus talking animals.

I’m really excited for Zen Cho’s first romance novel, The Friend Zone Experiment. I would describe it as Crazy Rich Asians meets Persuasion.

This interview was originally posted by The Nerd Daily in August 2024