204. Alex Kingsley: Writing Speculative Futures

“Fiction is a wonderful arena for dealing with some really complex topics and some difficult issues in a safe space.” - Alex Kingsley

In the latest How To Write the Future podcast episode titled, “Alex Kingsley: Writing Speculative Futures,” host Beth Barany chats with Alex Kingsley, a science fiction writer, playwright, game designer, and more exciting roles that inform their fiction writing.

Together they talk about AI cognition, the importance of human intelligence in creating for the future, how speculative fiction can help readers cope with complex issues, and why compassion matters in sci-fi.

ABOUT ALEX KINGSLEY

Alex Kingsley (they/them) is a writer, comedian, game designer, and playwright. They are a co-founder of the new media company Strong Branch Productions. They are the author of Empress of Dust, Relic of Haven and The Strange Garden and Other Weird Tales, as well as short fiction appearing in Translunar Travelers Lounge, Radon Journal, Sci-Fi Lampoon, and more. Alex’s sci-fi plays have been produced in LA, Philadelphia, and Chicago. Alex’s SFF-related non-fiction has appeared in Interstellar Flight Magazine and Ancillary Review of Books. Their games can be downloaded pay-what-you-will at alexyquest.itch.io. Alex is currently a graduate student studying speculative fiction at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

Website: http://alexkingsley.org

Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hitchhikersguidetothealexy

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-kingsley-56342a139/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@alexyquest

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/alexyquest.bsky.social

Newsletter: Newsletter: https://alexkingsley.substack.com

• SHOW PRODUCTION BY Beth Barany
• SHOW CO-PRODUCTION + NOTES by Kerry-Ann McDade
• EDITORIAL SUPPORT by Iman Llompart

c. 2026 BETH BARANY

Transcript

BETH BARANY 0:00

Hello everyone. Welcome to How to Write the Future Podcast. I'm your host Beth Barany. I'm a writing teacher and a coach and I specialize in writing and also supporting science fiction and fantasy writers because I believe when we envision the new that fantasy and sci-fi in speculative fiction can invite us into, we actually get a chance to envision ourselves in new ways and therefore create hope for the future, create alternative ways of being in the world. And I think that's really powerful. So I'm really excited to bring a guest to you today, Alex Kingsley, writer, and all kinds of other things, academic and, and more. I look forward to hearing everything that you're doing. Alex, I know will have a very interesting conversation. So why don't you tell us a little bit, about yourself and introduce yourself to everyone.

Alex Kingsley 0:49

Absolutely. So I am a science fiction writer in many veins. I am a novelist, short story writer, playwright, and, also a standup comedian on occasion, though, that usually does not have to do with sci-fi, and a game designer as well. I love to play in many different mediums. I am the author of The Bastion Cycle. That is the series that my debut novel Impressive Dust is in. The third and final installment of The Bastion Cycle will be coming out this fall with Space Wizard Science Fantasy, as well as the author of short fiction, some plays that have been produced in LA, Chicago, New York. And, Yeah. I also am a, an MA student at UIC studying speculative fiction and, writing the future and speculative futures is a huge part of my studies and the things that I am interested in. I'm doing a presentation later this year on Always Coming Home and the importance of Representing agricultural communities in the future in sci-fi. So that is super, super important to me in everything I study and everything I believe.

BETH BARANY 1:58

So wonderful. I love the diversity of all the things that you're doing. And, you, you said the acronym of the university. Why don't you speak out the whole thing so folks know?

Alex Kingsley 2:06

Yes, good point. the University of Illinois, Chicago.

BETH BARANY 2:09

Great. And we're gonna do some improv today'cause you gave you some questions ahead of time that you were like I don't even remember what I gave you, which is so cool. So, I would love to really know, So you work in audio, you work in theater, you work in comedy, improv, and game design and fiction, and you're in academia. So to me, you're working in all these different mediums, so. Looking at all the mediums that you work in, and then how does that affect you as a fiction writer?

Alex Kingsley 2:39

Yeah, I kind of think of it as having a lot of different tools at my disposal. I am a really big fan of learning a little bit of this thing, a little bit of that thing because every experience that I have, I is going to somehow end up in my writing in some way, can somehow like, fuel something that I'm writing and inform it. one of the biggest connections is between theater background and prose writing, because having directed actors having had that, like the collaboration that comes from that, the play that comes from that, but also really having to take a text, visualize the scene, understand the motivated movement in that scene, understand the minutia of the blocking. All of that has been super useful for me in like, when I am writing the physical layout of a scene, I'm thinking of it like I'm blocking it as a play. I thought I was gonna be a playwright originally. I, I mean, I am, but I thought I was going to be primarily a playwright, so I was really focused on the dialogue and of course writing all that dialogue pretty much exclusively dialogue has had a huge influence on the way that I write dialogue. But it meant that I was very comfortable with that and less comfortable with. Everything else and imagining it as, okay, this is actually just a play that I'm directing, was really, really huge. and then the. Improv comedy and tabletop game. I mean, tabletop roleplaying games are a form of long form improv, but generally, when people think about improv, they're thinking about short form comedy, getting jokes in. They're coming up with jokes, off the top of your head and And. table. Anyone who has played tabletop role play games know that. It's more about really understanding your character, understanding what kind of choices your character would make in a situation, and being able. To make those choices on the fly because you don't know what, you don't know what choices the other characters are going to make. You don't know what choices your game master is going to make. So it's all about having that intimate character knowledge and being able to make choices for them. And that's exactly what you're doing when you're writing fiction. Like I have always been much more towards the, panther side of things than plotter. Definitely things start to emerge and I start that to see structure. but where I really like to start is character. Like have a strong sense of who I'm writing and just the general. Concept, just the general situation that the thing that I always say is put that beast in a situation. Like, I like to imagine my characters that's like mice in a lab, rats in, in the maze. I just gotta have gotta A maze and some rats. And once I know my rats really well, I know what kinds of decisions they're gonna make when they get into that maze. so I'll end up writing scenes and be like, oh my God, I had no idea that was gonna happen. But that's so crazy.'cause that's, yeah, that's exactly what she would do in this situation. and that, that's part of the joy of it for me. So all of those pieces, and then the ac, the academic piece is just all that. But studying it, studying how other people do it, and how other people imagine the future and how other people use sci-fi, speculative, any kind of departure from our reality in fun and interesting creative ways and the ways that that can impact our society on a whole. So it does seem, I think like when I'm like, I do this, I do this, I do this, I do this. Like I am doing 5 billion things at once. It's actually just the same artistic practice, but it's taking a ton of different forms.

BETH BARANY 6:09

Yeah, I can really relate as someone writing teacher, filmmaker, and writing scripts and novels, a trainer and a curriculum developer. Did I say editor too? I edit fiction and video and you know, my own podcast. I'm my own I'm gonna be doing it for clients as well. So let's come back to academic work. You mentioned that you decided to study speculative fiction because, because why? Tell us a little bit more, why you decided to study it, and also how does it tie into your own creative work as a writer?

Alex Kingsley 6:41

Yeah, totally. I for a long time thought that I just wanted to be a creative writer, and I had this very. Rigid view of like, I do this and not this. Like I am a humanities person and not a STEM person and I am a, a creative writer and not an academic writer. Like I had all these sort of firm boundaries in my head. I think'cause that felt comfortable and safe and it made me feel like I knew what I was and it didn't put me in danger of trying something that I was bad at and then being like, oh no, I'm bad at this. because definitely we get a lot of that in our upbringing in school and then we kind of put ourselves into boxes for our own safety. eventually I started realizing I don't have to do that. I don't have to just be one thing. which again, is one of those things where like, sounds really obvious when I say it out loud, but I, it's, it was like a truth that I had not internalized until I was like, but what if, what if I actually did other stuff? part of it was I am always s preading the Gospel of Brandon Sanderson's lecture series. I think he is such a, an intelligent teacher, and puts things in a way that is like so clear and understandable and digestible. And one of the things that he talks about in that lecture series is. Learning about the things that interest you and like not having to be just a writer because the material that you write about is going to come from all of your other life experiences. And he talks about like John Grisham being a lawyer. And so all of his stuff is like law thriller. And you will have to combine your life experience with your writing skills, like you're not just gonna be one thing. and I went to the Nebula Conference for the first time in 2024 and there were all these academics there and I was talking to them about all these like really specific topics. I was talking to someone who was like a token expert, had a PhD and I just like had this revelation where I was like, wait. I wanna be an expert. I wanna be an expert in this. I wanna be an expert in sci-fi. Like it's, it's what I love. Why have I confined myself to only loving it as a fan and a creative writer when I could also love it as an academic and study it as a discipline. At that point I had applied to MFA programs, and did not get into any of the ones that I wanted to, so I didn't end up going that year. But for one of the applications, I had to write a critical piece, which I really hadn't done a lot of, and I had so much fun writing. Application. And I was like, well, that's not normal. People don't usually have fun writing applications. So, I, I realized I really like to write critically and analytically about the stuff that I enjoy reading, not just producing, you know, ingesting it and producing my own fiction, which was how I started writing reviews for ancillary review of books. now I also write for Interstellar Flight Magazine and Strange Horizons. I realized it was, it is just a thing that I love to do. So why not go to the place where they will pay me money to do it and I get to teach students how to do it and share all this joy that I am constantly, you know, constantly needs to, is flowing over, is brimming and needs to spread. I can share that with people. It seemed like the most natural path. And as soon as I started telling people, yeah, I think I'm gonna do this, they were like, that checks out. I thought it was gonna be a big announcement to be like, mom, dad, I'm going to grad school for English. and they were just like, well, yeah, of course you are.

BETH BARANY 11:15

Yeah. That's so great. So funny. People often see us in that way before we do.

Alex Kingsley 11:20

Yeah.

BETH BARANY 11:21

I love to ask folks all kinds of questions about their, passion for science fiction and fantasy, and I, I generally say science fiction and fantasy.'cause it's easier to understand for people who aren't in, who aren't inside the publishing industry or the academic industry. But we can also say just for folks who aren't familiar, speculative fiction is the umbrella term for science fiction and fantasy and weird fiction, and I think horror could fit it under there. And anything that is outside of what we call contemporary fiction. even historical fiction, if it has any element of magic, make believe, maybe the lines are blurred, can point to it and say this doesn't exist in real life, even though most fiction is, you know, obviously a stretch of the truth. but why? So now that I've defined speculative fiction, I would love to hear your definition of speculative fiction and also why you think it's so important.

Alex Kingsley 12:16

Yeah. my short answer of like, why I enjoy speculative fiction is reality is boring. We already live there. I, and it sucks a lot. not to be a downer. There's lots of, there's good stuff too. but also every day there's the horrors. So I'm like, I really, when I'm reading, I wanna be reading about things that are not.

BETH BARANY 12:40

Are not.

Alex Kingsley 12:40

but not for the reasons that people often describe. I think that for people who are not big readers, they kind of assume that, reading fiction is always escapism. And I'm sure as a sci-fi reader and a writer yourself, you know, that is not the case. Fiction is a wonderful arena for dealing with some really complex topics and some difficult issues in a safe space. being able to, grapple with these ideas that are really hard, from the comfort of your own home with a cat on your lap and a cup of tea. and it's really important that we be doing that work constantly as a society, because it's how we work through things is how we process complex issues. And like I said, reality sucks. There are complex issues in the world. the reason that speculative is so important to me is because it opens up this whole new realm of play and of possibility. It allows us, there are so many, Complicated things to deal with in our reality, if you are going to use it, so many constraints, if you're going to use it in your story and being in the speculative realm, I think it frees you from all of those constraints. It allows you to imagine, okay, what would a society look like if we had this? What might the human race look like in thousands of years? What would a totally. Different species look like. One of my main, areas of study right now is alternative cognitions. imagining using our own, you know, we're, we're kind of stuck with human brains, but how can we use our very human understanding of the world to conceptualize what it would be like to have a different form of. Cognition. I think that's especially important with the increasing importance in our society, whether we like it or not, of ai, to be able to understand, okay, the anthropomorphization of. Large language models that corporations are doing is a manipulation tactic, and we need to understand the kinds of processes that are happening that differ from human cognition. So we don't start attributing things to machines in a way, like assuming that they are human and assuming that decisions are made in the same way that we would make decisions because. They're not. also the idea of expanding personhood. What does it mean to be a person? Why is, I'm a big fan of like decentering humanness. I think a lot of, when we talk about, you know, human nature and humanity. and a lot of times when we talk about ai, like when will it be human intelligence? And I'm like, I would love to see humanness not really being the benchmark, cause also There's plenty of people who are humans who are not getting human rights in our reality. So I'm like, I would love for us to just establish a, like how can we treat a person and do that before we start asking is or isn't this thing human because does it matter? Because we're still treating humans poorly, lots of places.

BETH BARANY 15:59

we've centered everything, humans being the benchmark, but actually our intelligence hasn't, has done a lot of things poorly. Our so-called human intelligence. And, you know what, if we lived like whales or dolphins or bees or owls or, or, or the wolves?

Alex Kingsley 16:15

Yeah, exactly.

BETH BARANY 16:16

do we assume that what the way we think is, is the pinnacle? And I, and I know why there's a whole history of that, but

Alex Kingsley 16:23

Yeah.

BETH BARANY 16:24

yeah, I appreciate what you're saying about decentering human or human intelligence because we're animals just like the rest of'em

Alex Kingsley 16:31

Yeah.

BETH BARANY 16:32

forget that we act as if we're at some kind of pinnacle. And very interesting what you were saying about ai. I had an AI expert on,

Alex Kingsley 16:39

Ooh.

BETH BARANY 16:39

some episodes ago, and. You know. We never talked about it with that person, but I keep wondering why the people who design AI want to replace humans. To me, it feels like they want to replace humans. And I'm like, well, why? Why are you erasing, the very thing that you know, you are. I'm trying to understand the philosophy beneath this quest to everything, to be robotic. And I'm like, that's weird because you know, if you don't have a body, you don't have emotions. And, and we don't actually even really understand emotion fully.

Alex Kingsley 17:09

Yeah.

BETH BARANY 17:09

anyway, I could go off down that rabbit hole.

Alex Kingsley 17:11

Yeah, I mean, I'm sure someone who is an expert in the field of AI could tell you more that I could, my, I do focus on, representations of AI in fiction. so definitely discussing robots and how we perceive robot and I. Use those terms often when I'm talking about fiction interchangeably, just because they are like very murky. No one really has a firm definition. I have been looking a lot at the way that we perceive these things, and I mean, it does seem like a lot of it is money, because when the. Companies that are making the AI are able to then sell them to companies and say, Hey, why would you pay a hundred people to do this when you could have this machine do it for you? it. It doesn't matter to them if the quality is going to be good or if the people who are being laid off are not going to be able to support their lives like that just doesn't matter to them. so it gets marketed as a replacement and it also gets marketed as humanlike, uh, because we have our own assumptions about what intelligence is and how it has to resemble humanity.'cause that is what a lot of earlier sci-fi has taught us to expect. First ever robots in fiction looked just like humans'cause it was a play and they were human actors. That's part of what we have been, led to expect from our fiction. But also there's this attribution error that happens where people focus so much when AI does something bad on the AI itself. because we have been led to think of it as a person. So it's not this company has caused this harm. It is, oh, Claude did this. that's not, that's not a person. We're not there yet. We're not there. That is a statistical model that is trying to sound like a person and doing a good job. But the more we attribute problems to the AI itself and not the people making it, the more we let them get away with a lot of bullshit.

BETH BARANY 19:21

I agree. I agree. I mean, someone once said to me, oh, the algorithm decided this. I'm like. Somebody designed that algorithm. That's people behind that and they're like, oh yes, well, blah, blah, blah. You know, like I constantly feel like I'm reminding people that we made them. Humans made these things and it's complex, processes that humans designed.

Alex Kingsley 19:41

Yeah, and absolutely like things can come out of that that were not intended or anticipated, but that does not mean. The, the thing, the product equals a human intelligence, and that is not placing a value judgment saying like, it is less intelligent than humans because there are things that large language models can do that. Humans can't or, or they do it a lot faster than humans could, or more accurately than humans could. Like that is not placing a value judgment. It's just saying it is very, very different from human cognition and needs to be treated as such.

BETH BARANY 20:17

Yeah, I agree. I feel like you and I could keep going,

Alex Kingsley 20:20

Yeah.

BETH BARANY 20:20

have to have a future conversation. I like to end my interviews with this question, which once you hear it won't be so odd. but I like to spring it on folks, which is, when you hear how to write the future, what does that call to mind for you?

Alex Kingsley 20:35

It calls to mind any kind of forward looking fiction, any, anyone who is imagining what the future could look like, and a lot of times. I think when I talk about writing the future, people assume I'm talking about utopian specifically and like a good future. but I am a big fan of being somewhere in the middle. Like, I really like Ursula Kay Lagos term for the dispossessed, and ambiguous utopia. This idea of, there's a lot of stuff going on and it's a, it's very complicated and it's not, Hey, this is the ideal world and it's not. This is purely dystopia. Terrible. because nothing is really ever so black and white, at least it rarely ever is. and that would also not make a very interesting book. and I think that she is someone who, Was really a, a master of doing that. Like a lot of what I'm talking about in my presentation about always coming home is it's not like, Hey, this is presented as the ideal future. It is still important to imagine that a future like this in which we have returned to embedded communities as opposed to a concept of nation that expands beyond us, it is important to imagine what a future like that could look like. Doesn't mean that's exactly what we're aiming for. it's so important that we are imagining what it could look like if, hey, what if every, everything. Was sentient. What if the worms were solving complex math problems? Like what, what would that look like? having this space to play in the world of what if, because. We're not gonna be able to predict what's gonna happen, and it's not our job to be able to predict what's going to happen. But the more we can imagine, the more we can ask ourselves, what would we do in this situation? The more prepared we will be for what does happen. And most importantly, the more prepared our empathy will be... a professor who I kind of like grew up listening to and talking to and all of that, he would say at the core of sci-fi is asking what happens when our capabilities expand faster than our compassion? And I think that's why sci-fi is important, is saying, hold on, let's slow down and let's make sure our compassion is there as well. and that's honestly probably one of the reasons that, Murderbot is so important to me is so many robot stories are about what if there was a robot that was conscious and everyone was like, no, you're a machine. And it's so refreshing to have a book series where there's a robot that's conscious and immediately everyone's like, and we love you.

BETH BARANY 23:12

Oh,

Alex Kingsley 23:13

I I think that's really beautiful. Yeah. It's, that was a, that like a huge reduction of what those books are, but that was something that is, is so delightful about them is, the immediacy of the humans being like, and you're a person too, and we won't take that away from you.

BETH BARANY 23:29

Let's do wrap up. where can people find out about you and your fiction and stay in touch and all that good stuff.

Alex Kingsley 23:37

Absolutely. I am on Instagram HitchhikersGuidetotheAlexy. I am on, BlueSky@alexyquest and my website is alex kingsley.org. I also, I, I mentioned I do tabletop games. You can find my games@alexequest.itch.io. Those are the main places on the internet where you can find me. If you reach out to me, any of those places, I'll see it and I'll respond.

BETH BARANY 24:02

great. And we'll be including that information. So be sure to look in the show notes, the information that travels along with the podcast, and also on YouTube. So I'm gonna wrap it up here. Alex, it was so wonderful chatting with you today. I really love everything that you're up to. It's so interesting and I would definitely wanna have you back. I'm gonna wrap it up here with my little sendoff. That's it for this week, everyone. Write long and prosper.