Debut Sci-Fi Novel Offers a High-Stakes Thriller in Deep Space

Goodreads: While The Deep Sky is your first published book, you've had many short stories published and you’ve previously said that you've written, I think, five novels? Can you talk a bit about your writing journey?
 
Yume Kitasei: When I say five, number one was the one that I wrote when I was 13, so most of them are not anywhere close to publishable. But I always knew that I wanted to write.
 
When I was little, I was very scared of the dark, so I somehow got into the habit of telling myself these epic stories as I was falling asleep, sort of like my version of counting sheep, and that naturally evolved into wanting to write and tell stories. It was always something that I wanted to do. 
 
After I graduated college, I started writing short stories because it's a manageable size and a good way to hone your craft. It took me about ten years before I started getting short stories published, which is probably a good thing, honestly, because my writing ten years ago was not great.

The fourth book that I wrote, which I still love, was the book that got me an agent but unfortunately didn't sell. It was science fiction, an Ice Age Western, where the main character was a woman with a samurai sword, also part Japanese, who was like a sheriff deputy solving a murder mystery and riding around on a woolly mammoth. Then I wrote this one during the pandemic.

GR: What drew you to writing speculative fiction?
 
YK: I read almost everything, from literary fiction to mystery and science fiction and fantasy and romance and nonfiction. Every year I [read] the Booker [Prize] long list in the month of August. So I guess when I write, a lot of the elements blend together.

One [specific] reason why I'm attracted to speculative fiction is because, as somebody who is biracial, it's a place where you can live. In science fiction in particular.
 
When I was growing up in the US, about 1.5 percent of people were multiracial. And I’d look around in class and I’d be the only person. And that is something that I already see changing, and now it's closer to 10 percent. So when I think about the future, I think for people who are mixed race, the future is our nation. And it's a place where we might find a little bit more belonging.

I don't mean to make that so heavy, but I think practically, to the notion of what comes next, even though everything is so bleak sometimes and it's hard to have hope about what the future looks like, that's one thing that I'm yearning to see. And sometimes I wish I had been born in a later generation, if only because of that, I think that the future will look a little bit more like me.

GR: You’ve described The Deep Sky as a feminist space thriller. Can you talk about those aspects of the book—the mystery, the science fiction setting, and the emphasis on feminist themes—and how they came together?

YK: I started with the feminist space part. I grew up reading a lot of different things, but especially science fiction. I read authors like Robert Heinlein and watched Star Wars—I was a huge Star Wars fan—and it's great but it's always stories about a whole bunch of cis men running around on a spaceship where every once in a while they throw in a token Princess Leia. I wanted to write a science fiction book that was for everybody else.
 
And then, with the mystery aspect: I vowed to myself after the previous book that I'd never write mystery again; it's just too hard! But somehow it just sort of happened. It may be because I enjoy mystery and I just gravitated to it unconsciously.

GR: When it came to plotting the mystery, did you plan it all out ahead of time, and did you know who the culprit was before you started?

YK: That's really interesting—so I forget who I thought the culprit was, but it was not who it ended up being. I had it stored in the back of my mind that it could have been a lot of different people, and then, as the narrative started coming out, the perpetrator revealed themselves to me and I was like, ‘OK, this is the person that makes the most sense.’ Then in revision I tried to sharpen that.
 
I think that’s what is so challenging about mystery—how do you write it so that readers don't guess who it is until hopefully close to the reveal? But then the reader can go back and look at it and say, “Oh, yes, that's right” and see all these clues along the way.

Of course there will be people who say, “Oh yeah, I knew immediately who it was,” but hopefully a few people don't guess until the end. It’s a difficult balance to walk, and I think that's why mystery is so fun and challenging to write.

GR: Asuka Hoshino-Silva is mixed race and has always felt like an outsider who struggles at the intensely competitive training school the crew attends before the mission. How did you develop her character?

YK: A lot of the stories I write now tend to be about characters that are mixed race and if not exactly the combination that I am, then some sort of derivation of that. Part of it is because when I was growing up, I didn't have the opportunity to see a lot of stories like that and I feel it's important to have them. Also, I think in terms of science fiction realism, to me it's very normal to think about a future where a lot more of the main characters may be of mixed race or of multinational origin. So that was important to me.

With the school stuff and the crew, I was influenced a lot by the schools I went to growing up. When we lived in Japan (for three years during middle school) I went to an international girls school and everybody in the class was from a different country, which was a cool experience.

Then I went to a very intense, specialized public high school in New York and you slept four hours a night and there was one semester where I was taking something like ten classes plus two classes at the local law school. That kind of intense environment definitely heavily influenced how I thought about the school environment Asuka was in. The kids that she goes to school with were similar to the type of people that you might run into in the schools that I went to.

GR: While the mystery is unfolding in space, we see Asuka’s early life in flashbacks and learn how she ended up at the school, which she is sent to at age 12. How did you decide to structure the book like this?

YK: That was there from the beginning as I was constructing it. I wanted to play around with structure, and I hope it's not too alienating because I realized later that not everybody likes flashbacks. But I wanted the book to have this interesting structure that allowed you to peel back the onion of why somebody would choose to do a mission like this. And what were the factors that propelled them to do this?

And also, underneath, what were the motives that might have been seeded back then for somebody to plant a bomb on the ship?
 
I don't like villains. I think everybody has a reason for the things that they do that isn't simply “I woke up today and I wanted to be evil.” So I wanted to explore that and see how the pieces came together. It was important to me also, as I was structuring it, to line up the climaxes of the progression of the flashbacks so they would land right as you reached the climax of the present day thriller. And that was a fun puzzle to put together, making sure that each flashback starts to reveal something about the relevant plot point that’s happening in the present day.

GR: I imagine you had fun creating the details of life aboard the Phoenix. For example, the crew takes a drug called Sominol so they can hibernate for the first ten years of the journey, and there are 3D printers that make everything, from pharmaceuticals to mints. How did you create this world? And did you start with a map of the ship?

YK: I definitely drew a map. The first sketch was not very detailed and I had to fix it in revision—there was a lot of counting of modules to make sure it added up. But the general construction of the ship and how it worked were things I thought about as I was writing because it's helpful for me to block it out.
 
There were some things that I accept we know are not possible, like the whole notion of instantaneous communication across space using twin-part quantum particles. I think scientists today would say that definitely will not work. So I knowingly took a few liberties. But I did want it to feel like grounded science fiction, so it was all meant to be things that I thought were plausible and could happen in the near future for the most part.

Obviously the ability to build an interstellar spacecraft would maybe require some pretty drastic breakthroughs. But a lot of the other stuff like the Digital Augmented Reality is meant to be at least somewhat plausible.

GR: Yes, I love the Digitally Augmented Reality (DARs) that everyone uses, via a chip in their temple, so they can be in their own world. And then we have Alpha, the ship’s omnipresent AI and a character that has been compared to HAL in the Space Odyssey series. Was she always integral to the story?

YK: Yes, definitely, she was there from the beginning. As you are thinking about a character who is feeling alien and isolated, it seemed natural to me that she (Asuka) would have this strange friendship with the ship computer. And so the character of Alpha was in my mind from the beginning as the friend, but the slightly creepy friend.

GR: We are in a moment where there is increasing concern about artificial intelligence and its potential uses. At one point Ying Yue, the Phoenix captain, says that individuals living in their own separate augmented realities is bad and “it’s time to live together.” Was this a comment on how we can fragment if we rely too much on digital life?

YK: I was thinking about how our country has become very siloed and how that maybe feels more comfortable for people. But is it a good thing? I don't know. I don't think so. There's a danger as well.

And so as I was thinking about that, and we were going through the intensity of the last few years, it was definitely forefront in my mind. As I was building this world, where digitally augmented reality is much more of a thing, it was something that naturally dovetailed with that because it's like you're building your own reality to live in that other people may not share. And what does that do to a society, if you can't agree or you're not really living in the same world anymore? How can you ensure that you're really talking about the same thing?

So that was definitely part of my thinking as I was writing that.

GR: The Deep Sky encompasses much of the world’s current troubles, from the climate crisis to geopolitical instability. Was it therapeutic in some ways for you to write this book?

YK: Yes, definitely it was. I wrote most of it during the pandemic and that was a hard time for everybody. But it was definitely a form of escapism to go into this novel and put in my feelings.

And like I said in a comment that I left on Goodreads, in the first draft, when I read it through, I was like, “Oh, my gosh, somebody cries in every chapter” and it’s not meant to be this upsetting or depressing a book. So I did one edit that was just going through and cutting out some of the tears. But it was definitely therapeutic to write.
 
I think one thing is that we've all lived through so many things in the last 30 years. For me the beginning of it was when I was a freshman in high school. On my third day of high school we were about five blocks away from the World Trade Center, on the seventh floor, and we were looking out the window at the Twin Towers. We heard the first plane and then we saw the second plane.

It was very formative to how I think about what the future is going to be like because it's felt like you're always waiting for the other shoe to drop in terms of what the next big thing is. You're not just living in this vague context of history; we're witnessing it as it as it unfolds. No matter where you live now something big is happening. It's a very tense state to live in for all of us, and I think that that is something that will just continue to intensify as time goes on.

GR: I think what your book does so well is that, despite everything we just talked about, it's full of hope. For example, Asuka says at one point that their mission isn’t so much about preservation as possibility. Was that a big part of what you wanted to communicate?
 
YK: Yes, I'm fundamentally an optimist. I'm a pragmatic optimist. I think many things are possible. And I do have hope that we will figure things out and make things better. And that's something that is just a deep part of my person that influences the professions I choose and the stories that I write, so yeah, it's definitely something that I want to convey.
 
GR: Do you see yourself in any of the characters, or parts of yourself?
 
YK: I think probably all of them have elements of me because when you're writing a character, you think, “What is the normal way to react in that situation?” So it's inevitable that some of you leaks into them.

My worry is that people are going to read this book, especially people I know, and be like, “Oh, Asuka is the self-insert character, just because she's half-Japanese, right?” But I don't think I'm most like Asuka. Certainly I share some of her insecurities, but I'm very extroverted. In some ways, personality-wise, I’m much more like some of the other characters.

But I'm fully expecting everybody who reads it to be like, “Oh, Yume just wrote a Yume in Space novel’ but that’s not my intention at all!

GR: Which authors did you read growing up?
 
YK: I read a lot of different things. I read a lot in the science fiction realm and a lot of old-school science fiction, obviously, like Octavia E. Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke. And then in high school I discovered Kazuo Ishiguro, who is my all-time-favorite author.
 
GR: On your Instagram you’re reviewing many of 2023’s debut books. What have you read recently and loved?

YK: Yes, that has been very therapeutic. I just read a book called The Light of Eternal Spring by Angel Di Zhang. It's speculative literary fiction about a young woman who has just learned that her mother has passed away in China and she goes back for the funeral. She’s a photographer and has had the ability since she was a child to fall into photographs. And it was so well done. The pacing was perfect.
 
Another book I really enjoyed was Liar, Dreamer, Thief by Maria Dong, which I read at the beginning of the year. I honestly didn't know what I was getting into when I went into that, but it was a wild, wild ride and I highly recommend it.
 
And then I read The Tip Line by Vanessa Cuti. It's written in this really intense, frenetic way. If you read Sylvia Plath or Virginia Woolf, it's like this deep dive into the swirling of somebody's brain. It does daring things with craft, and I thought it was very good.
 
GR: You're working on your next book now. Can you tell us about it?
 
YK: I’d love to—am I allowed to? I don't know. But I'll tell you anyway!

I’m calling it my anti-colonial Indiana Jones in space. It's about a woman who is a reformed art thief. She used to steal artifacts from museums and repatriate them to alien civilizations. After her last job goes really badly, she decides to quit and becomes a graduate student of anthropology on Earth. Then a friend convinces her to do one last job. So she agrees, but as they get closer to the artifact they’re hunting, she starts to question, “What is it that I'm excavating here?” And she realizes that she might have to choose between preventing this entire species from going extinct and possibly dooming humanity.

So it’s a fun space opera adventure and has a mix of different types of science fiction, a bit of military science fiction and some thriller, horror aspects.
 
GR: That sounds fascinating. How far have you gotten with the writing?
 
YK: My editor has the first draft already. It’s got to be finished by August and will come out next year. There’s less crying in this one.

GR: One last question: What do you hope readers will take away from this book?
 
YK: I hope that people read it and feel, especially with the theme of imposter syndrome, which I think is so common, “Yes, I feel that way and I feel so relieved that somebody else feels that way, too.” I've said this before, probably in another interview, but I read to try to understand people and I write to be understood. And I think that those feelings are common, so I want people to read this and feel, whether it's the imposter syndrome, or the drama with Asuka’s mother, some commonality of feeling.
 
And then also if people think more about the world we're living in today and where we're going, I think that's sort of the point of science fiction as well. So hopefully there's some something to chew on there.