Interview with Scottish Science Fiction Writer SDG Lemaitre

Dormition: Short Stories from the Fallen Universe is Published!

Today, Dormition, which acts as a bridge between Risen and the fourth and final book of the Fallen saga, is live on Amazon. The first three chapters are available here (one, two, three) with the second being a spoiler-free prequel that those unfamiliar to Fallen can read.

The book is a collection of tweleve connected short stories that are set before Fallen and after Risen. I really hope you enjoy it.

Next post I’ll go in-depth into Dormition, but until then, consider getting the book for 99 cents (or read it on Kindle Unlimited)!

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Talking Non-American Science Fiction

Science fiction has long been a tool for cultures to envision how they would evolve and examine and comment upon contemporary issues. As I consumed more science fiction in various forms of media and met other authors, I began to appreciate the differences and similarities of foreign science fiction.

Motivated to learn more, I am contacting non-American scifi creators to get their comparisons of science fiction from around the world. If you are interested in being interviewed or know someone who would be, please comment below!

See previous interviews with creators from British (English), Nigeria, Pakistan, South Africa, and Ukraine.

SDG Lemaitre

SDG Lemaitre is a Scottish writer of speculative fiction, based in the Outer Hebrides. Originally trained in experimental particle physics, a circuitous career path eventually led her to English teaching and writing. Someday, she’d love the writing to be a full-time job.

Authors she enjoys and who influence her work to greater or lesser extent include (in no particular order) Ray Bradbury, Jeff Vandermeer, Ted Chiang, Ursula Le Guin, Robin Hobb, Isaac Asimov, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, George MacDonald, Brandon Sanderson and many more. You might also stumble on some Star Trek references in her work.

The Interview

Hello, SDG Lemaitre, first, tell us a little about yourself.

First of all, thank you so much for inviting me to take part in your series of interviews!

I’m a writer of speculative fiction (mostly sci-fi, occasionally a little fantasy or supernatural fiction) from the north-west of Scotland. “SDG Lemaître” is a pen name, chosen in honour of the Belgian cosmologist and Catholic priest Georges Lemaître, known as the “father of the Big Bang.” I’ve recently moved back to Scotland after a number of years working in China. In my day jobs, I work for one of Scotland’s universities and also do some freelance editing and other stuff. I originally trained in experimental particle physics, working on data management systems for the Large Hadron Collider. I then moved into academic editing, and worked for a particle physics journal in Beijing, before eventually shifting into academic language teaching.

When I’m not behind a computer screen, I’m likely to be out in the garden talking to the hens or trying to grow vegetables, or down by the shore looking out to sea and building castles in the air.

Before we go into your stories, I wanted to ask how one trained in experimental particle physics ends up being an author. I imagine the science part of your life helped with the science fiction telling.

In high school, I loved both arts and sciences. On the arts side, I particularly loved history, visual art, and creative writing. On the science side, I had a very inspiring physics teacher. I remember the sense of awe I felt sitting in his class, seeing how differential equations revealed more about the laws of motion. I felt that studying physics was the way to go right to the roots of how the universe works and to try and understand that at the most fundamental level. I reasoned that if I chose physics, I could still enjoy and learn more about the arts under my own steam, but that if I chose to study the arts, I would never be able to grasp the intricacies of quantum mechanics and relativity and the very fabric of the universe. Sounds grandiose, as maybe only a high school student can be! But it kind of worked out. I got my degree, and I loved it. It was every bit as beautiful as I’d glimpsed in that high school classroom. (Later, as a postgraduate, I got bored and frustrated with the narrowness of my particular research focus – but that’s a different story!)

I didn’t do much writing in those years, though I still did a lot of reading. I didn’t get back into creative writing until about ten years ago, when I was working in Beijing. Someone in my family suggested that instead of splurging on Christmas gifts that year, we should have a “creative Christmas”, where we all contributed something we’d written or drawn or made. I decided to write a short story, set in Beijing. I then wrote short stories as gifts for a couple of different friends on different occasions, and for subsequent Christmases, but still wasn’t writing regularly.

Things changed, as they did for many people, during Covid. I wrote my first novel during lockdown in Edinburgh, as part of NaNoWriMo that year. Then I had an idea for another novel, and began working on that. The more I wrote, the more ideas popped out like mushrooms, and the more I wrote the more I realised how much I enjoyed it. Then I discovered Substack and the fiction community here, and for the first time I was writing for a “real” audience, and I loved it. I published some short fiction in my publication, Coracle Voyager, then decided to go all in with a serialised novel. I re-read one of my draft novels and decided that story might work in this format. This is what became Destination Europa, a psychological sci-fi thriller that I published here over 24 weeks last year.

My scientific background definitely helps with my sci-fi writing, although not that many of my stories lean specifically on particle physics. “Psychoflage” and “Dark Matter” are a couple of exceptions, though the particle physics in those stories is extremely speculative! It also helps in knowing from the inside what it’s like at a physics research institution or university department, in depicting some of the ways that scientists actually work.

Reading your short stories, two jumped out at me because of their similar themes. The Nativity Scene and The Best of All Possible Worlds combine AI, androids, religion, and the meaning of humanity. Can you tell us about those stories a little bit more and what drove you to write them?

Both these stories have roots in thinking about the interaction of science and religious faith, in the context of the general debate about AI the last few years. The idea for “The Nativity Scene” originally came from a talk I attended by Prof. John Wyatt, a neonatal paediatrician and medical ethicist who has also done research on ethics in AI and robotics. He suggests that a crucial difference between humans and human-like androids would be that humans are born, whereas robots are manufactured. This ties into the Christian idea of humans being “in the image of God.” In the story “The Nativity Scene,” I was trying to flesh out those ideas a bit.

“The Best of All Possible Worlds” actually started from seeing robot lawnmowers that Edinburgh University had developed and were trialling in some of their grounds. I started thinking about AI replacing more and more jobs, right up to policy-making and government, all aiming to maximise good for the maximum number of people, but with hidden inherent biases. And in that kind of situation, how might people respond, how might church communities respond, and could an AI engage in religious worship? I’m a practising Christian, so exploring these ideas of science and faith, and how sci-fi ideas might play out for people of faith, is something I often come back to.

What other themes do you like to explore?

Having lived in China for over ten years, my writing often touches on things related to culture and language and how they shape the way we see the world. My short story “Deep Calls to Deep” is an example of that. Another related theme is thinking about how cultures and worldviews can shift over long timeframes, and how no culture or nation is perfect. My novel Destination Europa, as well as several of my short stories, is set in the world of the “Federation of Scandinavian States”, which from our point of view is a fairly controlling authoritarian system. That’s not because I think Scandinavia is any more likely than anywhere else to succumb to authoritarianism! Rather, it’s because to most people it would seem rather unlikely, and I like to flip the tables a bit sometimes and try to question assumptions. A thousand years ago, my part of Scotland was ruled by Norway, and it’s fun to think about how global geopolitics might change again over another few hundred years or more.

You also wrote the story Destination Europa. Tell us more about that.

Destination Europa is the first novel I’ve serialised and made publicly available. It started as another lockdown project, when I was in China during the very restrictive Covid measures there. Eagle-eyed readers might detect some of that sense of claustrophobia in the novel, which all takes place in the confined space of a large spacecraft carrying a bunch of colonists to Jupiter’s ice moon Europa.

The main character, Quill, is an engineer from Mars, which has broken away from Earth’s control. On Earth, the main power is the Federation of Scandinavian States, which is launching this colony. So there are some cross-cultural issues going on as Quill and the other Martians work for this superpower. Quill has his own secret mission, though, and his own personal demons to grapple with. When he discovers some odd things happening aboard the ship, he has to work out what’s going on, and what to do about it, before it’s too late…

How does your Scottish upbringing influence your projects?

I would say that in a lot of my writing — not all of it, but a significant fraction of it — I bring elements of Scottish culture and landscape into it, trying to include little snippets of the real Scotland, rather than the tartan stereotypes that people often think of. This is sometimes tiny things, like character names (for example, Uisdean in “The Labyrinth”) but sometimes it’s more central. My first novel (unpublished), for example, is set on my home island a couple of thousand years in the future.

But also, I come from a Gaelic community, and my first language was Gaelic (Scottish Gaelic, which is similar to Irish). This plays into the way I think about language and culture, being a minority language speaker, and I think that’s one of the themes that recurs in my writing.

Beyond that, being Scottish means having a complicated awareness of geopolitics and cultural identity, with the longstanding question of our relationship with the rest of the UK. We have been on the receiving end of cultural imperialism, but as part of the British Empire, Scots were also agents of imperialism. I think that’s part of the reason many of my imagined future worlds have nation states and alignments that try to flip the current world order in some way. The idea that no nation or group of people is always 100% good or 100% evil, but that the oppressed can just as easily become the oppressor, that even an oppressor can do good things, that good systems sometimes lead to bad consequences, that there is no utopia, but that even within a bad system, people can have lives of joy and hope.

Americans are well familiar with “British” science fiction, usually meaning English science fiction. How is Scottish science fiction unique?

This question is really thought-provoking and I’m actually finding it quite hard to answer! One issue is that when we try to define what counts as “Scottish science fiction,” we quickly run into the bigger question of Scottishness and what that means. Is it people who were born and brought up in Scotland? Or currently live in Scotland? People whose parents are Scottish? Grandparents? So when I think of Scottish science fiction writers, do I include someone like Michel Faber, who is Dutch by birth and upbringing but has lived in Scotland for quite some time now?

So I’ve decided to focus on probably the two biggest names in Scottish sci-fi: Iain M. Banks and Ken MacLeod. When I think about their writing, I see certain commonalities. Both include complex political systems in their imagined worlds, and I sense that awareness of geopolitics and imperialism that I think feeds into my own work. Both are (or were, in Banks’ case) quite strongly secular rationalists, which perhaps descends from Scotland’s Enlightenment tradition of rationalism. Both are/were strongly left-wing in their politics; Scotland in general is more politically left-of-centre than the rest of the UK. I’d say that this kind of left-wing, secular, activist worldview informs quite a lot of Scottish sci-fi.

We have to balance that with the fact that these two huge names in Scottish science fiction were both men of a similar generation and so might give a fairly narrow view of Scottish sci-fi as a whole. Not all Scottish writers would be secularists or materialists, for example, and not all would be socialists or political activists. However, we all come from the cultural milieu that produced the Scottish Reformation and the Enlightenment and the Jacobite rebellions and the labour movements and the independence movement and all that, and to a greater or lesser extent that influences the way we see the world, and gives that flavour to Scottish sci-fi that you might not find elsewhere.

What elements of science fiction do you think are universal no matter what country they come from?

The thing I immediately think of is the age-old question of what it means to be human. I think most science fiction writers, at some level, are asking these big questions: who are we, and what is our place in the world?

Also, the sense of curiosity and wonder, the “wouldn’t it be cool (or scary, or crazy) if…” element of speculation. I guess not all sci-fi has that, but I think that’s universal across all societies.

What bit of science fiction do you think will be a reality soon?

​​Probably something fairly mundane and depressing, like Earth orbit becoming impassable due to an ablation cascade (Kessler syndrome, where there’s so much stuff in orbit that space debris causes more and more debris, until there’s an exponential cascade of tiny pieces of junk that damages anything trying to get through)… I’ve just been reading The Sky Road, by Ken MacLeod, where just that scenario has grounded spaceflight for hundreds of years.

What is next for you?

One of my goals for 2025 is to edit and publish an ebook and paperback of Destination Europa! While I work on that, I’ll continue to publish short stories and shorter serials on Substack, and hopefully produce a short story collection in book form later in the year too. I’ve got some ideas for a sequel to Europa, but there are also a couple of other draft novels clamouring for editing. More ideas than there is time to write them! My dream is to make a living from my writing, but that’s still a long way off!

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Until Next Time

Next time we’ll have an in-depth look (both non-spoiler and spoiler options) at Dormition.

As always, please leave a comment with any questions, reviews, thoughts, whatever about Fallen, Risen, Dormition, An Odd Pilgrimage, The Savannah Paranormal Detective Agency or whatever else I have discussed. I promise to reply!