Author Q&A with Phillip Carter

1. How do you approach starting a new book?

Most of them arrive as dreams. The “seed” for Who Built The Humans? was a few jokes I wrote based on a previous book. The book before that started as a short story that started as a question, “What if I died and met a robot that claimed it created the universe?”

Those are the sorts of things that interest me, and the things you will find in Who Built The Humans?

2. What’s your favourite genre to read?

My favourite genre to read is science books, specifically those that bridge the gap between physics and philosophy. I particularly like “Why does the world exist” (Jim Holt) and “sum” (David Eagleman). I’ll also pick up anything related to time, time travel, or how we perceive and conceptualise time. I’m not a time traveller though, I just find it interesting.

3. How do you choose your book’s title(s)?

My book titles arrive from what I call the “seed idea”, the central thought that drives the book, so that way I’ve never struggled with titles unless it’s a big book with many central ideas. In my (unreleased) 2016 novel, The Stephanie Glitch, Stephanie tries to understand the significance of her own existence in a confusing and broken multiverse. In her quest she decides she is a glitch in a simulated reality. This may or may not be true, and this central question became the title. Before that, the working title was simply “afterlife”, which was unreasonably dull.

4. Tell us about a scene that you loved but had to edit out of your book

There is a sequence of 10 connected time travel stories in Who Built The Humans?, and one scene where a time traveller notices his partner’s necklace was left behind in the future. I had originally included a later scene where he finds a replacement and gifts it to her, and a subsequent scene where she is wearing it near the end of the story, but the gifting scene didn’t fit the tone. I am writing an expanded timeline that fills gaps like these for the handful of people who might be interested, but the published stories did not need every moment to be included.

5. What do you do when you have writer’s block?

I don’t believe it exists. I’ve only struggled for ideas once whilst on potent migraine medication, and promptly stopped taking it (it made ideas slippery and hard to keep hold of). I think what a lot of people call “writer’s block” is actually a lack of confidence in themselves or the ideas. If people put more thought into what inspires them, and more time into thinking about it, I think a lot of writer’s block would dissolve.

6. Tell us about your writing/ published book(s)

I have been both a writer and a publisher in equal measure in recent years, working primarily with short stories and poems. My most recent project is Who Built The Humans?, which is the book I am most confident about. It’s brilliant. Officially it took two years to write and publish, but its roots stretch back farther than that, so it means a lot to me.

Who Built The Humans? is a collection of 47 short stories, from soaring Science Fiction to searing Satire. These can be enjoyed as standalone pieces, but readers who want deeper worldbuilding will be pleased to know that each story is set in one of 11 distinct universes, and that each of these contributes to a larger, poetic whole. The format of the book itself was meticulously designed to support this duality of form. A front to back read will enable you to enjoy each story individually without two stories from the same universe bumping into each other, and a secondary index (called the Cosmic Topology) will help readers follow universes they become invested in. This way it is both a short story collection and what I call a “fragmented novel”. The Science Fiction side asks (and then attempts to answer) big questions, and the satire side takes those questions and pokes holes in them with a big stick. Why did aliens create humans? They were probably just lonely.

There’s also a “build-your-own-adventure” style narrative built with 15 of the 47 stories, so that that particular universe can give each reader a different experience based on their choices.

Where can you find Phillip?

You can find Phillip on Twitter.

Author Q&A with Phillip Carter