Were we looking at Contagion? Was everything ever going to go back to normal? I wrote Upgrade during the time of COVID and it was hardest book I’ve ever written, not just because of the subject matter, but because no one knew how bad this pandemic was going to be.

Every day we’re confronted with headlines, and I don’t know how a sane, compassionate, empathetic person couldn’t wish, to some degree, to be able to forget all that and just do your work. What Severance ultimately tapped into and, maybe what I was going for but didn’t realize, is that this is a very hard time to be alive. That idea really resonated with a lot of fans of the show-why do you think that is?Īll we see all the time is the bad news. It also raises this question of whether it’s possible to literally turn off a part of yourself to get something done.

It’s the first thing I’ve seen in a decade that I am madly jealous that I didn’t come up with that idea. I want to bring that into high concept, quote unquote, science fiction. We just want to read about other people going through life. It always felt like a writer came up with a really cool idea but forgot that all anyone cares about at the end of the day is character journeys. What I missed were characters I cared about. One of the things that made me want to be a sci-fi writer, before we eschewed the idea that I’m a sci-fi writer, is that I love the imagination of it all. He says: “I could put my feelings inside this cage, I could close the door.” Have you ever wished for that kind of ability? Read More: 27 New Books You Need to Read This Summer After he’s upgraded, Logan realizes that he can essentially turn his emotions off. The last dodo bird didn’t know it was the last dodo bird. Are we going to be here prevalently as a species in 100 years, 75 years? It’s a weird thing for a species with full sentience to contemplate its demise. The book is set slightly in the future, because I wanted to accelerate where some of the climate change and more in-the-weeds technology was heading, but it’s a mirror of where we might be five minutes from now.

Blake recursion