Peter Giesin

Peter Giesin writes science fiction because it is the most honest mirror he knows. Not a window onto other worlds. A mirror, set at an angle, so you can finally see the part of yourself you cannot look at head-on. Give a thing a strange enough shape and a reader will walk all the way around it, and somewhere on the far side they meet themselves.

Every story he writes begins from a single what-if. Take a life you were sure you understood, change one impossible thing about it, and watch that life rearrange until you can see it again. The point is never to predict the future. It is to see the present, and yourself, more clearly. One question runs under all of it: whether what comes next for us is not a new technology at all, but a rediscovery of what only a human can become.

He is at work on Design of Fate, a nine-book literary sci-fantasy saga that carries the same move to the scale of a civilization, on a single conviction: that imagining a world that does not exist in order to understand the one that does is the oldest thing we ever did, and the part of us most worth keeping. The books are long and unhurried, and they give the most to the reader who returns to them.

He cofounded Ignite Publishing for the same reason he writes: to help other people's stories reach the readers those stories were made for. If you would rather be met than told, his books were written for you.