Not long after, Crossed Genres Publishing put out a call for stories for an anthology they were calling Fierce Family. I wanted to write them a story with a strong and loving queer family at the core, and I returned to the same people from my previous story, this time concentrating on the daughter, Sophie. Sophie’s voice was a delight to write, and even as I turned that piece in, I knew I wanted to tell more of her story.
After that, I returned to the Pilot concept a few times. I wrote a third story for a third anthology, Accessing the Future, in which I focused on a different character, an early adopter. That story helped me understand the downsides of the technology, which I hadn’t explored in the previous pieces. I figured out certain key facts: that David would join the military, that Sophie would join an anti-Pilot group, and that they would eventually bump heads, but I wasn’t sure how or why. I had a vague idea that it wanted to be a novel, but also that I wasn’t ready to write it yet. I didn’t know enough about the family or the technology I wanted to invent, and I needed to level up to the point where I was capable of telling their story in full.
I thought about this family a lot over the last several years, as I wrote fifty other stories and A Song for a New Day. With each of those works drafted and edited, I gained new skills. I learned more about medical devices and implants, and the differences in approval paths for devices versus medicine. I explored who my device would help, who it would hurt, what it would complicate. I realized the differences between the four characters, and how they had four distinct perspectives on the Pilot. I gathered more key images: Sophie on the bus, David on the big screen at the baseball game.
As I wrote the first draft, I developed Sophie’s voice, and Val’s, and Julie’s. Sophie was tremendous fun to write, with all her coiled-up rage and her desire to prove herself. I thought I needed to avoid telling the story from David’s perspective because there was no way to show exactly what was going on in his head. It wasn’t until I tried writing a chapter from David’s point of view that I solved the puzzle: I absolutely needed to find a way into David’s head. It was a matter of seeing everything at once, and then conveying that to the reader, which was a joyous challenge as a writer. The more I understood each of them, the more able I was to give them freedom to make their own choices. That’s always my favorite part of writing fiction: when characters take on a life of their own, and you feel like the conduit. Once that happens, I know I can find my way to the end.
Even though this is my second novel, the history of We Are Satellites is the history of my writing career, and I’m overjoyed to share this family with readers.
Reading List: Eleven books that inspired me while I wrote We Are Satellites
The Danger Within Us by Jeanne Lenzer—If you want to know what it looks like in real life when people aren’t believed about their medical devices, read this.
The Lesson by Cadwell Turnbull—Right when I was trying to figure out the structure and if four points of view was too many, Cadwell came along with a brilliant novel of first contact, told from far more than four perspectives.
Infomocracy by Malka Older—If you want a fictional political science thriller that also includes a good look at corporate influence on public policy, start here.
Accessing the Future: A Disability-Themed Anthology of Speculative Fiction, edited by Kathryn Allan & Djibril al-Ayad—Yes, I have a story in here that’s tangentially related to We Are Satellites, but there’s also a lot of brilliant stuff in these pages.
Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction!—Published by Uncanny Magazine, this special issue edited by Elsa Sjunneson, Dominik Parisien, Nicolette Barischoff, S. Qiouyi Lu, and Judith Tarr is a feast of own-voices fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and more.
Bellweather Rhapsody by Kate Racculia—This novel features an old hotel and some great music writing, so I was already preprogrammed to love it, but it was a useful marker for including teenage voices in an adult novel.
The Dutch House by Ann Patchett—It was helpful while I was writing a family novel that takes place over a number of years to read a brilliant decades-spanning family novel.
The Red: First Light by Linda Nagata—You don’t need to like military science fiction to fall for this gripping novel and its sequels. Nagata is great at writing accessible near-future fiction—see also The Last Good Man.
The Warehouse by Rob Hart—A near-future page-turner about a horrifying corporate future. If you’ve read my novel A Song for a New Day, this is like a glimpse inside a Superwally warehouse, tense and thrilling.
The Radium Girls by Kate Moore—A horrifying, tragic nonfiction book about the wave of the future and the horrors that it brought to those who worked in the factories.
Autonomous by Annalee Newitz—Pharmaceutical pirates, military robots, and a designer drug gone awry.
Photo by Karen Osborne
Sarah Pinsker’s A Song for a New Day won the 2019 Nebula Award for Best Novel, and her collection Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea won the Philip K. Dick Award. Her short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, F&SF, and numerous other magazines, anthologies, and translation markets. She is also a singer-songwriter
