R. Jean Mathieu's Innerspace • SF/F, sociology, some recipes. Updates every other Friday.

Why do you write speculative fiction? / What is speculative to you?

Speculative fiction has been my favourite genre as a reader since I was a teenager, so when I started writing seriously it felt natural to me as a place to write from. I like the freedom that being able to write at one remove from lived reality gives me. As for what is speculative, that’s a hard one to answer.

Where do you find inspiration for your stories?

A lot of them are inspired by things I find out about at work: if I hear about a new technology, my mind often goes down imaginative rabbit-holes thinking of what the consequences might be.

What is your favorite sci-fi, fantasy, or horror trope? / What is your favorite sci-fi subgenre?

My favourite SF trope is the sentient machine, or biological construct. I like speculating about what an intelligent thing that was deliberately built by humans would be like in terms of its psychology and culture. After all, even if we model them on ourselves (deliberately or accidentally), they’ll take on developments of their own, and I like to explore what that could be like.

What is your favorite speculative fiction book (besides yours)? / What is your favorite speculative short story?

There’s quite a lot, but I’d like to particularly mention “Fool To Believe” by Pat Cadigan. It’s a novella that I read as a teenager and found that initially, I didn’t understand it, but the story intrigued me enough that I kept on reading over and over until I did. I thought if I could eventually write something like that, I would be very happy.

What is the world you long to see?

I’d say it’s the one I use as background for my self-driving car mystery stories and novel, Driving Ambition. It’s a bit utopian in that there’s universal basic income, most people work in the arts or in innovative sciences, there’s a big social welfare ethos and queerness is generally accepted. Not everyone is happy there, because human beings are human beings, but I think I could be.