This story is extremely real in a painful, if-this-goes-on way, and gets to the core of how much could be at stake with the rise of LLMs. Aside from this being an Omelas story without being an explicitly Omelas story, what were you aiming to unlock in its readers?

I was trying to evoke the complexity of generative AI’s effect on teaching literature while maintaining that I think generative AI is destructive for teaching literature. In the story, Booker was raised on chatbots and feels gratitude for the comfort they gave him when he had little else. That’s a real, meaningful experience, and no one should be made to feel guilty over whatever cultural oxygen mask helped them survive the unthinkable. But that doesn’t mean I don’t fear what generative AI is doing to the literature classroom. This story was vaguely fictional when I wrote it in February 2023, but reality quickly lapped me. I’m a literature professor and I am watching universities force professors to use AI to create course materials (usually because “it’s cheaper”). The potential for fascist censorship is horrifying.

I read Principal Walker’s letter and felt fury like I rarely have when reading a story—in a good way, though—and I found the rest of the story similarly emotionally raw. What emotions do you aim to stoke in your stories, and do you have any tactics for eliciting them that you want to share?

I don’t really think in terms of “trying to stoke emotion.” As a writer, my goal is to compellingly and believably describe a situation and characters’ response to it. If the story evokes a strong emotional response in readers, that’s great, but that is almost a secondary consideration for me. This story’s reactions came easily because I am deeply afraid/angry at the commodification of education, which ranges far beyond generative AI.

Epistolary stories aren’t uncommon, but they’re hardly the majority either—though I don’t think this story would’ve worked in any other format. What drew you to the epistolary format for telling this story?

I see this story almost as a case study, or a case—like a trial, with evidence. We see Jude make a series of choices; we hear his justifications for those choices; but mostly we stay outside of him, and the story is more focused on the effects of his choices, because neither his good intentions nor his own pain change the damage he caused.

Is there anything you’re working on that you’d like to talk about? What can our readers look forward to seeing from you in the future?

I would love readers who liked this story to take a look at my 2024 story “The Spindle of Necessity,” which appeared in Strange Horizons. It’s also about the complexities of our relationship to literature: a trans guy meets a beloved author in a dream, who he’s convinced was trans too; then things get weird.