How would your friends describe you?

more introspective—she cares about all the things that Gilly doesn’t. That gave the book a much better balance, and I wound up rewriting Gilly’s chapters in the third person to make them consistent.

Anders was challenging, because when he’s viewed from someone else’s perspective, it’s fine that he doesn’t always seem to make sense; that’s just him being the slightly insane person he is. But as soon as I’m writing from his point of view, his every action must be completely reasonable in his own eyes. So that changes how he feels to the reader in a fundamental way. That was part of the appeal, though; I wanted you to revise your opinion about each character as you saw different perspectives—not flip your understanding on its head, because that’s just annoying, but, hopefully, deepening over time.

I saved Jackson until last because I knew it would be short and I wanted to get it right. She’s the oldest—the closest to my own age— and I loved how this created a contrasting viewpoint to the others.

“That’s how computers work: They’re not infallible, but they don’t make human-like mistakes.”

Would you classify Providence as a war novel? A political novel?

It’s about war because you can’t really talk about life at a high level without conflict. From the perspective of a whole species, life is nothing but constant war. And it’s occurring at all levels, even below our notice. For example, there’s a war raging to colonize the human genome, fought between genes—it’s very slow, and has been going on for hundreds of thousands of years, but it’s a desperate struggle to the death. And that war has defined who we are—and what we are—today.

So I loved the notion of these interlocking conflicts: Humanity is at war, but human beings are also vehicles created by genes to fight a genetic war. And there are many more like that. The conflicts are too large or small for anyone to comprehend the whole thing—they only see pieces. I wanted to create a canvas that had a lot of moving parts—some slow, some fast, but all ultimately connected, all variations of the same struggle, repeated across many different forms of life.

Since this is your first “full-blooded sci-fi novel” (i.e., set in space), did you have to research any real space travel technology, etc., or did you just let your imagination run wild?

It’s somewhere between those extremes. Providence isn’t a hard sci-fi novel—I don’t attempt to explain the science behind a “hard skip,” for example. But I am militant about internal logic, which means that I won’t let an idea survive unless it’s completely reasonable within the established rules of the universe. For example, it’s never made sense to me that a futuristic battleship would miss. If your weapons system is being run by advanced AI, it will hit with practically every shot it takes. That’s how computers work: They’re not infallible, but they don’t make human-like mistakes, where they get things wrong sometimes just because. They make a totally different kind of mistake.

It drives me crazy when sci-fi stories include amazing technology but the computers still can’t shoot straight, so this was a chance for me to write in a universe that I thought made more sense.