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What's the story behind the story? What inspired you to write this book?

A long-held thought experiment: what would happen if religious people discovered that God didn’t exist? What would the implications be for humanity? I’ve grown frustrated by how the debate between religion and atheism has stalled—trapped between blind devotion and smug rejection. In truth, rather than experiencing existence from opposite ends, believers and non-believers are essentially the same. The faithful doubt and the faithless wonder. Both ask the same questions. Why everything? Why anything? Few of us are as convinced as we are convinced we are. Blind faith is hardwired into humans. It’s evolutionary. Entirely rational. It serves a higher purpose than truth itself. Atheists like me may have logic on our side, but we come up short where it matters most. Error 404 explores this idea.

If you had to pick theme songs for the main characters of your book, what would they be?

The main character’s theme song would be Tim Minchin’s “Thank You God.”

What's your favorite genre to read? Is it the same as your favorite genre to write?

Biographies and comedy fiction.

What books are on your TBR pile right now?

The End Of Faith by Sam Harris
The Amateurs by John Niven
The Echo Chamber by John Boyne

What scene in your book was your favorite to write?

The opening chapter, which began life as chapter three, then gradually elbowed its way to the front.

If you could choose one thing for readers to remember after reading your book, what would it be?

Be less certain about your answers and more curious about everyone else’s.

What's the story behind the story? What inspired you to write this book?

The question behind the book is this: how far would we go to live, or to revive, our utopia in space? For my heroines, Ganymede is not just a moon laid waste by a war of greed. Their Ganymede is their lost dream, their utopia betrayed, their stolen future, their forbidden love—an echo of the myth itself, of the mortal carried off by the king of the gods. With this book, I wanted to take our deepest aspirations for space, transpose them into the Solar System of the future, and confront them with the reality of the Universe. That is also what physics, my trade, does: you open yourself to the immensity in order to measure yourself against it. Without realizing it, I think I carried our dream of a better life in space all the way to the Ganymede of the future. My Furies are not coming back only for revenge. They are coming back for what was taken from them.

If you had to pick theme songs for the main characters of your book, what would they be?

Actually, they pick their theme songs themselves. Believe it or not, rock ’n’ roll is still alive and well in the 24th century. Yona, my heroines’ mother, keeps reminding her daughters that what a young woman needs above all, to survive in this macho universe, is the spirit of rock—the spirit of insubordination. And there is nothing better in life than kicking space invaders’ asses to “Aces High.” Or taunting your Earthling foes while singing “Iron Maiden”—which happens to be Aspera’s own nom de guerre. One AI cat, much to Sarah’s despair, prefers the pop of Dead or Alive. And what else would a relativistic interstellar ship run on, if not “Don’t Stop Me Now”?

What's your favorite genre to read? Is it the same as your favorite genre to write?

I read all day for work—highly technical papers, textbooks, reports—and I hardly read any fiction except on vacation. My real daily reading pleasure is the news, and long wanderings through Wikipedia, most often on history pages. So no one should be surprised to find the traces of it in my books: my neo-samurai is a cross between the Japanese samurai and the courtly knight, sworn to a woman whose love is forbidden to him, and bound to commit seppuku should he fail to save her.

I do avoid reading or watching too much science fiction, so as not to be influenced. I would rather invent my own, from the invariants: those of physics and those of human history.

What books are on your TBR pile right now?

My pile has a shameful half: physics textbooks. Right now, Quantum Field Theory for the Gifted Amateur, to prepare a course. And a more presentable half: Astrotopia by Mary-Jane Rubenstein, which takes apart the ideology of space conquest—she makes good arguments, even if I don’t share them all—and The High Frontier by Gerard O’Neill, whose 1976 enthusiasm has not always aged well.

And then two books that never leave my desk. Mythology by Edith Hamilton, the first book I ever read, at ten: the constellations and the Greek legends led me to astronomy. And Mind Over Muscle by Kano Jigoro, the founder of judo. Readers of Furies Unleashed will understand why.

What scene in your book was your favorite to write?

The Samurai’s Triptych: a three-stage assault plan devised by the old admiral of the Ganymedean fleet. The three stages follow the principles of judo—preparation, disruption, execution—the very ones he once taught to one of my heroines, back when she was his apprentice. Thirty years later, you find them deployed across 800 million kilometers, from Jupiter to the heart of the Solar System, each stage carried by one of the novel’s protagonists.

To write the longest raid in human history, I went back and forth many times between my interplanetary trajectory simulations and the needs of the story; the trajectory plots are in the scientific appendix of book three. But the astrodynamics were only there to make the samurai’s dilemma more heartbreaking: he is not seeking victory. He only hopes that his friend will have to kill less.

Do you have any quirky writing habits? (lucky mugs, cats on laps, etc.)

No lucky mug, but a good old notebook. I live with my characters; I take them everywhere. A scene inhabits me for days, I relive it, I sometimes even end up dreaming it, and then one morning it has to come out. A can of Nalu—our Belgian answer to Red Bull—and then a few hours of uninterrupted flow: I write in French, the dialogue arrives on its own, as if I were a spectator of my own characters. It comes so fast that I feel like I am holding a kite in a strong wind. It pulls, and I love it. Then I go to sleep. A short nap, usually around 2 p.m.

My illustrator, Fabrice, is almost always my first reader. We agree on the most visual scenes, he turns them into images, and more than once I have adjusted a character’s description because his illustration showed me what I had not managed to write. His three covers are the three women of the trilogy: Aspera, then Sarah, then their mother Yona.

Do you have a motto, quote or philosophy you live by?

My faith lies in doubt, so that I may doubt in good faith.

If you could choose one thing for readers to remember after reading your book, what would it be?

We will take nothing up there but what we are: singing mayflies, fallible, but not without hope. Like my heroines, we often believe utopia is lost, behind us. But utopia is like a rainbow: forever pursued, never caught. It is in the pursuit that it gives us its light.

What's the story behind the story? What inspired you to write this book?

I was watching a documentary about polar bears, not that there are any in the book; sorry if you love the cute brutes. Suddenly, the idea sprang into my head about ice. What better than very cold ice, and what would be even better was if the ice wasn’t on Earth, but just hanging around Jupiter. Of course, I then had to imagine all sorts of things happening on this extremely cold moon. It just so happens that after the nature programme, I saw the local news about an unexploded WW2 bomb on a beach in the UK, near where I live. Naturally, the bomb led me to a gun, and the rest is history, or rather the future.

If you had to pick theme songs for the main characters of your book, what would they be?

Reggie and Wilson would probably appreciate “I Will Survive” by Gloria Gaynor. Marie is more classical in private, but would be best summed up by “I Gotta Feeling” by The Black Eyed Peas. As for Matt, he would love anything as his theme tune, but he would really enjoy “Hey Ya!” by Outkast.

What's your favorite genre to read? Is it the same as your favorite genre to write?

I read anything and everything, but my go-to is science fiction, and for non-fiction it is about myths, legends, and history. I write the same as I read, mainly sci-fi or speculative fiction, but I am a multi-genre author; I write what I’m interested in. I’m in the process of publishing a new book of Silly Rhymes and Verse. After that, I’m writing another sci-fi, but maybe in poetic form. I’m undecided, but I do like the idea, which means it is likely to happen in the near future.

What books are on your TBR pile right now?

There are a lot of essays from ancient Greeks and Romans; I seem to add one whenever I buy a fiction book. I’m about to start reading a series from A.G. Riddle. You see, when I like an author, I end up buying everything they have written and then engrossing myself in their worlds for a few months—that is what I am about to do reading-wise.

What scene in your book was your favorite to write?

It’s not so much a scene; I enjoy writing the banter between characters and how they interact. I love writing dialogue; it can get a little spicy. But people in real life swear when things get tough, or when they experience highly unexpected things. I like my characters to be real, salt-of-the-earth types.

Do you have any quirky writing habits? (lucky mugs, cats on laps, etc.)

I can’t write in my dressing gown; it seems to sap my imagination, and I’m more likely to have a nap after lunch.

Do you have a motto, quote or philosophy you live by?

I have several mottos: my first is “Go for it,” the second is “Be kind to all life,” and the third is “laugh as often as possible.” I could go on, but you can see they are about being in the moment.

If you could choose one thing for readers to remember after reading your book, what would it be?

That they giggled, or, even better, they guffawed while on the train or a bus to work, and other passengers looked at them and wondered what was so funny.