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The Big Idea: Thomas Elrod

Posted on May 14, 2026    Posted by Athena Scalzi      4 Comments

It can be hard to have solid opinions and identities when we live in a world of mixed messages and misinformation. With propaganda running rampant, how can we be sure if reality is really real? Author Thomas Elrod plays with this idea of a false reality in his newest novel, The Franchise. Tune in to his Big Idea to see how one man’s fiction may be another man’s reality.

THOMAS ELROD:

I think we are all a little fatigued by the long-running IP franchises on TV and in movies. Sure, we all had a good time watching Harrison Ford return as Han Solo or were happy to see Captain America wield Thor’s hammer, but lately? Eh? It all feels tired, as long-running franchises often do. Good thing Hollywood has plenty of other films and shows in development and we can look forward to some fresh stories in the coming years…

Okay, so there’s the rub. It certainly feels like not only will our big cultural mega-franchises not be retired, it is as if they can’t be. Too much of the shareholder value of Disney or Warner Brothers or Netflix is wrapped up in these very expensive properties for these very large corporations (always merging together into even larger corporations) to ever stop. They can’t. They have to continue generating revenue and growth.

What happens to culture if it can never stop recycling itself?

My big idea was this. I wanted to imagine a film franchise that just kept on going forever, kept expanding and looking for new ways to juice the IP. I was partially inspired by the failed Star Wars hotel, which tried to create an immersive storytelling experience for guests in Disney World, but which was too expensive and wonky. However, it’s not hard to see how Disney was using that experience to commodify LARPing and cosplay and other fan activities into something they could monetize and turn into content.

So I did the thing Science Fiction writers do and I extrapolated, imagining a Truman Show-esque environment where a film studio sets up a living set of a popular fantasy film franchise and populates it with people who have had their memories changed to believe they are real characters in this world. Plots are put into motion, writers and actors are hired to push the story along, and everything is secretly filmed. It’s pitched to fans as a limited-time experience, where you can sign up to have your memory temporarily altered so you can live in this world you love so much. Surely, nothing will go wrong!

The challenge as a writer is how to sustain this concept for the course of an entire novel and also how to build a real story out of it. This is always the problem with high-concept ideas. It’s one thing to come up with a hook, it’s another to create interesting characters and engage them in the twists and turns of an effective story that doesn’t become repetitive.

For me, the thing I held onto was the larger “What if” that this concept suggests, which isn’t just about intellectual property in Hollywood but about one’s identity in a world of misinformation. We all live in a kind of constructed reality, whether we know it or not, based on our sources of news, social media, entertainment, etc. We all know people who seem to live and exist in a totally different conception of the world than our own, and this is both baffling and frustrating. But we still have agency over our own lives, and if we want to spend our energy on, say, denying the efficacy of vaccines or insisting a fair election was rigged, to what extent does a person need to take responsibility for those opinions and to what extent is it possible (or ethical) to blame their misinformation reality on their beliefs?

This is a thornier question but also one which provided a way into the story, which very early on I knew was going to include many different character POVs, some from people who play a minor role in the actual plot but whose perspective ends up being different or interesting. Since some people in the story know what is really going on, some have partial information or suspect something, and some have their own views on what is happening despite possibly knowing what is “real,” the great gift of interior and perspective that fiction affords was my way to start building characters and story. My book would be about this confluence of perspectives, and what happens when they clash into one another.

Along the way there was lots of opportunity for light satire about Hollywood, deconstruction of modern fantasy storytelling, and a lot else, but being able to marry theme and structure was the key to making sure my Big Idea, my book’s hook, actually worked and remained interesting over 350 pages. It ended up being a blast to write, so I hope that comes across to everyone else and that they have just as good a time reading it.

The Franchise: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s

Author Social: Website|Instagram|Bluesky|Threads

Read an excerpt on Reactor.

The Big Idea: Sam Beckbessinger

Posted on May 13, 2026    Posted by Athena Scalzi      5 Comments

We’ve all got a beast inside us, waiting to be unleashed. For some, they never hold it back. For others, they keep it caged until it can be repressed no longer. Enter author Sam Beckbessinger, whose fury led to the creation of her newest novel, Femme Feral.

SAM BECKBESSINGER: 

My new novel Femme Feral didn’t grow out of a Big Idea so much as an emotion, or rather, the lack of one. 

About a decade ago I was walking around Cape Town on my way to a friend’s birthday. It was one of those perfect picnic-dress days, a spring-in-your-step song-in-your-heart kind of summer afternoon. Then I realised some dude was following me. I did the things all women do. Reached into my handbag and clutched my keys. Scanned for easy exit routes or an open shop I could dash into. Sped up my walk, but not too much, because you don’t want to over-react or trigger his prey drive. This wasn’t the first time I’d been followed, obviously, but something about this time was different. I wasn’t only afraid, I was furious. I’d been having a lovely day until this creep ruined it! And I found myself having a fantasy I’d never had before: that I could reach into my bag and pull out a gun, turn to him, and make him feel afraid.

This was a shock. I’ve never been an angry person. I hate guns and I loathe violence. So much so, I’ve wondered before whether something was wrong with me. Spend time with any toddler and you’ll see that fury’s a foundational human emotion, yet it’s one I’ve barely ever felt. I’ve been a lifelong good girl, empathetic, nurturing, forgiving – sometimes to my detriment. I started to wonder, what happens to feelings you never feel? Are they still there somewhere inside of you, hidden, waiting? Do they mutate? And when they do finally come roaring out, will they be uglier for having been locked away for so long? 

Femme Feral grew out of those questions. It’s the story of a hypercompetent tech executive in her forties who thinks she’s going through perimenopause, but she’s actually turning into a werewolf. She doesn’t realise it, but once a month, she transforms into a violent beast who savagely mauls everyone who pisses her off in her waking life. The problem is, sometimes it’s the people you love who hurt you the most. Oh, also, there’s an obsessive monster-hunter on her trail – an eighty-four year old vigilante named Brenda who’s trying to find the creature that killed her cat.

The perimenopause part was fun to write, because that’s a joke about how the medical industry still somehow, in 2026, knows about as much about perimenopause as it knows about lycanthropy. When I wrote it, I was myself approaching forty, seeing the first signs of my own oncoming werewolf era (perimenopause usually begins earlier than most people think!). I can’t tell you how many of my friends I’ve seen go to the doctor to get help for a range of confusing midlife symptoms and instead of being given any actual help, the doctor suggests maybe they should try losing some weight. 

But the gorgeous thing about midlife is that it’s also – for many of us – the age our lifelong coping strategies begin to fail, and we’re forced to reckon with everything we’ve been repressing. Anger is an unacceptable emotion in women, so many of us repress it or transform it into something else. The beautiful thing about midlife, for many of us, is that our bodies no longer allow us to do that. Some of us have quite exciting breakdowns that lead to healthy realisations and overdue dramatic life changes; some of us lure our toxic bosses into an alleyway and rip their intestines out. Whatever a girl’s got to do.

This is exactly what I love so much about horror: how it allows you to speak the language of metaphor and play with our most primal emotions. It amuses me, too, that the werewolf is one of the most stubbornly masculine of monsters in our culture because we still find it impossible to imagine women as uncontrollably violent (there are some glorious exceptions, of course, from Ginger Snaps to Alan Moore’s “The Curse” to Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch). 

Unlike my previous novel Girls of Little Hope, which I co-wrote with my friend Dale Halvorsen and which we carefully planned and outlined before writing a word of prose, the first draft of Femme Feral came out of me in a hot stinking vomit (almost like … it had been curdling inside of me all this time). The first draft was a half-formed hideous thing, which I then spent several years pulling into the shape of a novel. Many spreadsheets were involved, since control is my coping mechanism of choice. 

I had a blast taking a wild premise and then trying to work through the consequences very seriously. If you could rip someone’s head off, whose head would tempt you first? What would an NHS GP say if you told him that once a month you find yourself naked and covered in blood on the other side of town with no memory of how you got there? And the question that probably vexed me more than any other (and John Landis never had to deal with): how the heck is this beast roaming all around modern London without being spotted by CCTV?

The process of writing this story was deeply therapeutic for me. I’m not sure I’ve fully worked out exactly what I think about anger, but a novel’s not a polemic so it doesn’t require you to have an argument. It only requires you to have some questions, and then to get in touch with the parts of yourself that might be asking them. In my case, that was a furious beast I had been telling myself wasn’t even there. 

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Femme Feral: Amazon (US)|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s|UK 

Author socials: Website|Instagram

The Big Idea: Ada Hoffman

Posted on May 12, 2026    Posted by Athena Scalzi      2 Comments

When it comes down to it, all humanity really has at the end of the day is our stories. Telling stories around the fire is a tale as old as humans themselves, and author Ada Hoffman expresses the importance of these stories, and the importance of being human, in the Big Idea for their newest novel, Ignore All Previous Instructions.

ADA HOFFMAN:

When I tell people the premise of Ignore All Previous Instructions, they often remark how it reminds them of real life these days. In Ignore, the characters live in a space colony on Callisto where a generative AI company owns everything – and where making art or telling stories, without the AI’s assistance, is strictly not allowed.

Certainly there are parallels between this dystopian premise and my life in 2026 – working as an adjunct for a university computer science department where the people in charge keep yelling about the “pivot to AI” and how terrible it will be if we don’t all get on board.

But I wrote Ignore in 2023.

Publishing is slow, and novelists write about current events at our own peril. In 2023, I could see which way the tech industry hype train was going, but there was no way to know if it would still be going that direction three years later. I hoped it wouldn’t be. I decided to write the story anyway and see how it landed, because the topic was so close to my professional expertise and so close to my heart.

Another part of the novel, even closer to my heart and equally timely, was the problem of queer self-expression and book bans.

In 2023, I was at an early stage in therapy. I was just starting to think back, in ways I hadn’t allowed myself before, about how some of my experiences growing up had shaped me. This included a lot of things, many of them not germane to this post, but it also included the experience of growing up queer without understanding that that’s what it was.

My gut told me that I needed to write about these experiences – more urgently than I had ever needed to write about anything before.

In 2023, we were already seeing book bans and “Don’t Say Gay” laws. I didn’t know if that trend was going to continue for three years, either. I hoped it wouldn’t. But I couldn’t help but look at that news and think of my own childhood. I eventually did find words and concepts for what I was experiencing, although not necessarily in the healthiest way. The generation after me was given so much more, in terms of words and ways of understanding themselves. It galled me to see reactionaries trying to take that away from them again.

When I put these two urgently emerging problems together, I could see that they had one big thing in common. They were both, at heart, about the deep human need to express one’s own feelings – and a powerful movement that threatened to take it away.

AI writing is not an expression of the genuine heartfelt thought or experience of a human. If it is carefully prompted to express a human’s heartfelt thought, then the thought comes from the human, not the AI. Research shows that, the longer we use a generative AI, the less our own thoughts enter into it; instead, offloading our thinking onto an AI causes our own capacity for independent thought to atrophy. Given the fervor and urgency with which tech companies urge us to use AI for everything, one might be forgiven for suspecting that this atrophy is their goal.

Moreover, because it’s trained to predict the most likely continuation of a set of words, AI writing will always converge toward the most mainstream or most common way of looking at something. The mainstream of the training data – essentially, the whole Internet, plus all the published books that the tech companies could find – is not queer. Even without any deliberate censorship, the perspectives of queer people and other minoritized groups are less likely to be considered in an AI’s output. For the same reason, if the AI is deliberately prompted to represent a queer perspective, it will rely on broad averages and stereotypes – not the lived and felt experience of an individual human who is queer.

But in hard times like these, independent thought based on our own lived experience is exactly what we need. This is the skill that helps us to understand when something is not quite right, or doesn’t quite match the truth of our lives – whether it’s a structural injustice or something personal.

Ignore All Previous Instructions tells the story of characters who grow up caught in a system where their own thoughts and voices are not valued, and who find ways – determinedly and imperfectly – to tell their own stories regardless. If there’s one idea readers take away from the book, I hope it’s the beauty and power of storytelling in our own words – and the need to hold on to it in the face of an establishment which would rather our stories weren’t told.

Ignore All Previous Instructions: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop

Author socials: Website|Bluesky

Read an excerpt.

The Big Idea: Jill Rosenberg

Posted on May 7, 2026    Posted by Athena Scalzi

While it may seem like fantasy is as far from the real world as possible, author Jill Rosenberg suggests that indulging in fantasies and fiction actually connects people instead of isolating them from reality. Dive in to the Big Idea for her newest release, Now I’m Photogenic and Other Stories I Tell Myself, and see if our desires are really just human nature.

JILL ROSENBERG:

People often think of fantasy and the imagination as ways to escape reality, but I think there’s a more complicated and fraught relationship between the two. What we long for, the ways we wish to escape—this grows out of our real experiences of the world. But the reverse is true as well: our “real” experiences are colored by our fantasies. 

We might, for example, wish to be an Olympic-level athlete, as one of my characters does, but this wish highlights the absence of her athletic talent, which may not have shown up as an absence if she’d never longed to be an elite athlete. That feeling of absence and desire drives her behavior, which changes her reality, and the resulting experience changes her understanding of herself and what she really wants.

Our imagination can’t free us from the world because our imagination is made from the world.  But it can alter the way we see things and what feels possible. The first story in my collection is called “The Logic of Imaginary Friends.” This is where I present this big idea most directly. A single mother is left lonely and longing when her eleven-year-old daughter goes to sleepaway camp for the first time, so she reunites with her imaginary friend from childhood.

It’s great at first, until one imaginary friend is not enough, no matter how she morphs him in her mind to meet her shifting needs and desires. The fantasies are fun, but not satisfying, and she begins to feel that she’s choosing this fantasy life over her life with her daughter, but does she have to choose between the two?

As a child, I used my imagination to revise reality. Every Thanksgiving I’d feel so excited for my cousins to visit. I’d imagine myself gregarious, irresistible, rehearsing all of the interactions I’d have, writing their dialogue and mine. But when they arrived, I could never be that person or get the response from them I wanted.

Later that night, however, I could rewrite the dialogue to be more plausible but equally thrilling, given what actually happened. That was always my favorite part of the holiday, alone in my room, taking what happened and transforming it into the holiday I longed for. But the bigger the gulf between my fantasies and reality, the less I was able to enjoy the fantasies or the reality.

It’s this competing desire that compelled me to write these stories: the desire to be known, seen, recognized and special, to connect with those around us, and the desire to hide what makes us unique, to pretend we’re no different from everyone else.

On the one hand, my characters are often reminding themselves of their freedom. Maybe they really can be anything they want to be, but when they try to do it, out in the world, it’s not so easy. They can’t control reality or other people’s responses the way they can control their fantasies. But the more they shy away and hide from the real world, the more that fear of reality infects their fantasies, or, in the surreal stories, the events of their fantastical lives. As a result, their fantasies and their lives get weirder and worse. 

Of course, my strange characters and the unusual things that happen to my characters all stem from my own strangeness and my unusual thoughts and experiences. In my real life, I do not always feel like showcasing the ways in which I deviate from the norm, but I am happy and proud to put my strange and unusual characters out into the world because I do think that fiction shows us new and different ways of being. 

The role of fiction, even surreal fiction, is to bring us closer to the experience of being a human in the real world. That marriage between—and tension between—dream and reality is what I find most thrilling and ultimately satisfying in both my writing and my life.

Now I’m Photogenic and Other Stories I Tell Myself: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s|Watchung Booksellers

Author socials: Website|Instagram

Read an excerpt of one story from the collection: The Logic of Imaginary Friends

The Big Idea: Andrew Dana Hudson

Posted on May 6, 2026    Posted by Athena Scalzi      5 Comments

While we all know that technically our lives could end at any moment, sometimes that fact can feel far away. Author Andrew Dana Hudson brings that little known fact into the spotlight in his newest novel, Absence. Come along in his Big Idea as you think about what you would be leaving behind if you were to suddenly, mysteriously, become absent.

ANDREW DANA HUDSON:

What if people could disappear at any moment? How would the world adapt?

We were a year into the pandemic, and I was riding my bike, trying to get out of the house I’d kept myself cooped up in since the previous March. I found myself thinking about the weird pseudo-raptures that had shown up in pop culture over the last few years, like the “Thanos Snap” in the Avengers movies, or the “Sudden Departure” in The Leftovers—big supernatural events that impact everyone all at once. Where were the slow, crawling, banal supernatural disasters? Metaphysical catastrophes less like the rapture and more like the pandemic, or climate change: complex, unfolding, uneven, during which people have to go on living their lives despite unprecedented circumstances.

I got home, got off my bike, and wrote what would become the first chapter of my novel Absence. In this world, people are vanishing into thin air—with a loud popping sound—but it isn’t all at once. It’s one by one by one. Sometimes there are spikes, but mostly it’s ambient. It can happen to anyone, any time, which means everyone is wondering when it’s going to happen to them or their loved ones. Some fear it, others ignore it. A few are eager for it, for wherever people go when they pop. There are fakers and scammers and conspiracy theorists. A few tired bureaucrats try their best to manage the situation. We develop new norms and institutions and infrastructure, without ever ceasing to feel that it’s all so strange.

For me, writing this book was a way to process and capture in fiction the looming dread that I’d felt over my shoulder ever since the first COVID lockdowns. It was existential as much as epidemiological. A fear that an invisible force could reach into my life and take away someone whose presence I’d relied on.

Of course, people have always been mortal, fragile. We’re all a heart attack or a car accident or a well-placed meteor away from being out of the picture. But during that first pandemic year, that inherent human fungibility felt much more present in daily life and public spaces. And when people did get sick, they often disappeared, into quarantine or ICU intubation or, in a few places, mass graves. Death became both more and less present in our lives, and that was something I wanted to explore.

So what would you do? How would you live if you or the people you care about might be gone tomorrow, or the next second? And how would we as a society cope if we couldn’t rely on everyone showing up every day to do the jobs that keep all the economic gears turning together?

In Absence, drivers vanishing on the highway cause enough crashes that solo car travel is discouraged, and pilots popping mid-flight have travelers feeling safer on trains. Theater productions need extra understudies. A lot quickly becomes automated. People try to keep an eye on each other, because the worst thing is to disappear without anyone to tell your loved ones you’re gone. Trust in institutions erodes—which we’ve seen happen in our world too, but here is supercharged by the impossible-to-explain nature of this supernatural phenomenon.

When I started, I thought I was writing a short story. Instead, I found this premise just kept on giving me new wrinkles to explore, and so I kept writing, until I had a whole novel with a twisty mystery and a messy X-Files–style romance. And lots of jokes, since as dark as it was, 2020 was the funniest year of my life. Everyone was suddenly online together, riffing about the many absurdities of our new situation and flailing government. I spent half my days in group chats, laughing at bad memes until I cried. Tragedy and farce were all rolled up in one.

It’s always bothered me that we never got vaccine Mardi Gras, a sudden moment in which we could all hug each other and dance together without fear. We just got more unfolding, more arguments, more slow disaster. For me, exploring this big idea and writing this book eventually provided a lot of that catharsis I’d looked forward to.

My initial big idea turned out to have a lot to say about COVID culture and how we’ve been frog-boiled by climate breakdown, but also about how uncertain and contingent life is and has always been. We tell our family and partners we’ll always love them, but often it doesn’t work out that way. We make plans and then throw them to the wind. We think we’re on solid ground, and it turns out to be so much quicksand. That’s just part of being human. Finding meaning and companionship despite all that is the challenge we wake up with every day, each day perhaps the last before something makes us pop.

Absence: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s

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The Big Idea: Martha Conway

Posted on May 5, 2026    Posted by Athena Scalzi

Do we as a society tend to abide by the phrase, “if you love something, let it go,” or are we more likely to dig our claws in and refuse to part ways? Author Martha Conway discusses in the Big Idea for her newest novel, We Meet Apart, just how impactful the absence of family members and loved ones can be, and what it feels like to be left behind.

MARTHA CONWAY:

When I was twenty-three, three of my five older sisters divorced themselves from our family. They took care to tell me that their issues were with my parents, not me, but nevertheless, I didn’t see or hear from them in over ten years. They didn’t attend my wedding, which hurt me deeply—it seemed to me that their non-relationship with my parents was more important to them than a relationship with me. 

My feelings back then were tumultuous. I missed my sisters, I was angry, I was confused, and I was sad—often, it felt like, simultaneously. Later, when my mother died quite suddenly, I felt the same way: an avalanche of mixed emotions.

What do you do when a loved one leaves, or dies? Would you follow them if you could, even if it meant giving up your own independence, your own future? And how do you honor all the many emotions you feel without drowning in them?

In my speculative historical novel We Meet Apart, two American sisters find themselves stranded in Ireland in 1940, but in two separate worlds. They believe their whole family has died. One sister, Gaby, is devastated with grief but lives a comfortable life; her younger sister Sabine is angry and must fight to survive in a war-torn country. When they finally meet—for only an hour a day, at dusk, in that thin veil between two worlds—they must decide whether to stay together or part, probably forever. Staying together is familiar and comfortable, but it doesn’t allow for their personal growth. Parting means growth, separation, and possibly danger.

As I was writing this novel I found myself wondering: can a person give up a loved one voluntarily? And what are the consequences? What are the consequences of hanging on? 

The older I get, the more often I hear a similar story to my own from friends and acquaintances: they have a family member who is “off stage” or “out of the family” or “not speaking to the rest of us.” The shame I once felt around my own broken family has lessened, knowing that others have had this experience, too. 

Today I have a good relationship with two of these sisters, but it took time. Partway through writing We Meet Apart, when it became clear to me that one sister was going to go her own way, I felt a kind of acceptance. Children grow up, families change, siblings relocate, and the nuclear family shifts into another form. Sometimes, when it happens suddenly and without warning, it feels more impactful. But it always happens, to one degree or another. As the saying goes, the only constant in life is change.

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The Big Idea: Matt Harry

Posted on May 4, 2026    Posted by John Scalzi      2 Comments

In his new novel Ashland, author Matt Harry posits a world that is a little bit… gooey. If you don’t know what that might mean, or what it would mean for anyone who has to live in that world, never fear, Harry is here to get you up to speed. Here, put on this protective clothing before we go any further.

MATT HARRY:

Science fiction is riddled with tropes. The mad scientist, the killer robot, the first contact with aliens. My personal favorite has always been the concept of gray goo – an end-of-the-world scenario envisioned by K. Eric Drexler in his 1986 book Engines of Creation. Basically, it centers on the creation of a self-replicating technology that grows and grows until it devours all the biomass on Earth.

It’s a pretty depressing concept, but one that never seemed particularly feasible to me. How could a single organism affect the entire globe at once? Then the Covid-19 pandemic hit. Everything shut down and everyone shut themselves inside. As I walked through the empty streets, I found myself pondering a simple question: How could this be worse? That was immediately answered by a follow-up question:

What if we never went outside again?

Such a dystopian idea, I realized, could be due to my own version of gray goo. I considered a lot of options: nanotechnology, viruses, alien organisms. I reached out to an infectious disease doctor and a robotics expert for inspiration. Eventually, I came across an invention that blends multiple fields – organic microbots. These tiny organisms are created in a lab and programmed to perform simple tasks, such as drug delivery, pest control, or anticancer treatments.

But what would happen if these microbots went rogue? That question led me to create the Ash. This self-replicating swarm of organic microbots is developed to destroy cancer cells, but a programming error leads it to target muscle proteins instead. Of course, the Ash gets out, and twenty percent of humanity is killed in the first month. To survive, people are forced to seal themselves inside plastic-coated buildings. If they have to go outside, they need to wear hazmat suits or use remote-operated drones.

Now that I had the what and the why for my dystopian world, I needed the where. Since I’ve lived in Los Angeles longer than I’ve lived anywhere else, I decided to make my hometown the main setting for Ash Land. LA is a sprawling, sunny, outdoors-oriented city, so it felt particularly brutal to trap everyone inside.

Finally, I needed a who. What sort of character could I toss into this dystopian nightmare? A romantic seeking connection? An action hero? Eventually, I decided that a detective would be a fun choice. Trying to solve a mystery while the protagonist is unable to collect evidence or interrogate suspects in a normal manner immediately gave me lots of ideas. To make things a bit easier, I imagined someone pretty similar to myself: middle-aged, father of two boys, loves pop culture and solving a good puzzle. Unlike me, I decided to make him a divorced ex-cop and a pain in the ass. (For confirmation on that last part, you’ll have to talk to my family.)

Every day during the pandemic, I would drive around my then-five-year-old son, trying to get him to fall asleep so I could write for a couple hours. I would park somewhere scenic, and look out over the empty City of Angels while imagining a scenario much worse than my current one. It was oddly therapeutic. The concept of Ash Land led me to develop all kinds of near-future trappings: air locks on every entrance door, transport pods nicknamed coffins, a dangerous gang of scavengers known as Scrappers, and a system of sealed walkway tubes that leads to Griffith Observatory.

Ultimately, I tried to create a gray goo scenario that is plausible, unique, and will hopefully remind readers of humanity’s resilience. After all, if our world can weather Covid-19, I believe we can find a way to fix our other problems, too. Ideally it won’t take a swarm of flesh-eating microbots to make us do so.

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