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by Brian Scott Pauls
The following interview occurred November 3, 2026. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Brian Pauls: Alex, welcome to The Cosmic Codex. I appreciate you taking the time to come and talk with us.
Alex T. Singer: I appreciate being here. Thank you very much.
Brian: Well, I would like to start with a question about your background with speculative fiction. How did you get started with an interest in speculative fiction, in particular science fiction?
Alex: Well, like a lot of people, I’ve been interested in speculative fiction my whole life. It was ingrained in me very early on by the books my parents read to me. My father actually read 2001: A Space Odyssey to me at a very formative age. Then he showed me the movie, and apparently Kubrick meant nothing to me, because I was just annoyed it wasn’t the book.
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Brian: I get that. I have the same attitude toward movies a lot of times. But exposing you to quality science fiction…
Alex: Oh, yes. My father was one of those people whose taste in novels went very, very highbrow. He was very interested in the high-concept stuff. He taught me to read using Moby-Dick, so there you go.1
Brian: Oh, wow. The full text, not a slimmed-down kids’ version?
Alex: No, full text. He was explaining the themes to me as he was also explaining how to spell “whale.”
Brian: Were you able to explain what ambergris was at a young age?
Alex: Yes. I think I confused a few of my first-grade teachers when I brought that one in as a book report.
Brian: Well, I love Moby-Dick, so kudos to your dad. I’m guessing this turned you into a lifelong reader early on.
Alex: Yes, it did. I was also going to say that I’m very lucky my grandfather was also a writer. He was trained as an intelligence officer during World War II. The war ended before he was able to deploy, but he had all that intelligence training, so he wrote a lot of conspiracy thrillers.2
Brian: Oh, wow. What an example.
Alex: Oh, sure. The biggest one he ever did was The Parallax View. It was well known enough that it even got a movie adaptation once upon a time. Warren Beatty was in it, so it was a very cool thing.3
Brian: That gives me something to go track down. It’s hard to get my wife to watch science fiction movies, but I bet I could get her to watch that.
Alex: Oh yeah, especially because it ended up in the bones of so many conspiracy thrillers.
Brian: My next question—I think you lit on it. It’s one thing to be interested in science fiction, but you became a writer. How did that happen?
Alex: Well, my grandfather, mostly. He was very encouraging. He would have me sit with him and show him the stories I’d write, and he’d give very gentle but firm feedback. He was very good at telling me, very gently, “You’re using a few too many adverbs, Alex.” He always made the time for me, and he was a very good mentor like that to a lot of young writers.
Brian: Well, that is fantastic. And obviously, you have just won the Sturgeon Award.4 Tell us a little bit about the story that got you the award.
Alex: Certainly. “We, the Fleet” was my Sturgeon-winning story.5 It was a short story—”short” is relative; it was really more of a novelette—about a first contact from the point of view of the alien. She is basically a hive mind. I based them very heavily on ants and bees, using their social structure with a techno-organic aspect to make them completely unlike humans.
Brian: Explain that for us. That’s a word I don’t know.
Alex: Oh, techno-organic?
Brian: Techno-organic. Okay, sorry, I misunderstood. Got it.
Alex: Techno-organic is that fusion of the technological and the biological to make a new kind of creature that has some anatomical references while also being very machine-like in its aspects and mindset. So when she encounters a human for the first time, she has no context for what we are. It was a short story about connections—about de-othering the other, essentially. Because of that, I wanted to start with the point of view of a creature that would normally have been considered the villain in a lot of classic science fiction.
Brian: I met you at the Sturgeon Symposium recently, where you read the story to us.6 One of the things I said to you afterward is that I found something touching about your story: you have a discussion in there about what family means. I’m paraphrasing, and I’m not going to do anywhere near as good a job as you did, but family starts with a genetic relationship, and as society and social relations evolve, it can grow beyond that. It’s kind of a question of how wide you draw that circle.
I found that a meaningful resonance, because as a father—my eldest daughter is adopted—that means a lot to me. And my wife is a social worker, an adoption social worker. Now she’s a college professor, but she used to spend a lot of time explaining to prospective adoptive parents that this is a different relationship than you might have with a biological child, but it is nevertheless a family relationship. “Do you understand that complex dynamic?” That’s what she has to talk through. So I was touched that you included that in the novel. [Editor’s note: “We, the Fleet” is a novelette.]
I also think I said to you that it was one of the few times I’ve found an author who has written a story where we encounter aliens, and there’s a conflict, and we actually have something to teach the aliens—other than the long history of “we taught them that we were just better at violence than they were.” Something else happens in your story, and I thought that was a really creative way to go about it. Could you talk to us a little bit about how you settled on not just the theme of connection, but that particular approach to it?
Alex: Certainly. As you mentioned, adoption—forming new connections that, while not biological, are still very meaningful—taps into the best of what we are as humans. We see a lot of the worst of what we are as humans, especially in the news cycle, especially these days, when we’ve been polarized into hating each other based on arbitrary labels that have been selected for us. Humans weren’t made for a society this big and disconnected. I wanted to take a step back from the negative side of that to try to remind myself, as well as the reader, of what our better qualities as a species are. And a lot of that is how we can find connection with things that may not be recognizably us, or may not be our immediate genetic relations.
We see that in a lot of ways with people. We see it in how we love our pets, and in how we’ll go out of our way to rescue an animal that’s trapped somewhere. We also see it in how we can take a person who we’ve been told is the other—”This is someone you should not relate to at all; don’t think of them as a person”—and if you learn even the slightest thing about them, your whole attitude toward them can and will change.
I really wanted to show that changeover: at what point would my human character begin to recognize this completely alien species as someone they can connect with? Similarly, the alien learns from the human that she took in her niece as her daughter, which, from the alien’s perspective, is absolutely impossible based on how her social structure was ingrained into her. Learning that humans can make that very simple but meaningful connection outside the boundaries of their genetics is a huge moment for this non-human character. Like I said, it’s our ability to form social bonds even outside of a species, which we as people do almost every day of our lives.
Brian: That is a great message, and executed in what I found to be an unusual way compared to what you normally see, even within a genre as interested in the different as science fiction. What was your biggest challenge as you wrote this story? Did you run into anything where you thought, “I really have to work through this in order to make this work”?
Alex: Yes. For me, it was actually figuring out where the conflict would be. This was a story I reworked several times before I was satisfied with it. The original version was a lot cozier. It was much shorter, and it was largely just a single conversation between a human and, essentially, an alien insect. I was really not satisfied with it. I felt like it didn’t say enough. I’m not going to say I wanted it to hinge on any form of violence, but it was almost too peaceful—like, “Let’s drink tea and talk about what we are.” I wanted to illustrate it a little better, and make what’s going on more physical and more visceral.
Brian: Excellent. Well, you certainly accomplished that. So the first version was more of a philosophical dialogue?
Alex: Exactly. That was the original one. I had the opening, and I had the ending. It was the middle that I reworked several times to figure out how I wanted to tell the story.
Brian: Talk to me a bit about the short story form in general. A hundred years ago, it was a major form of popular entertainment, and today that niche is filled by anything from novels to video games to movies to streaming television shows.7 Like anybody, a writer has a limited amount of time. When you sit down and say, “I’m going to write something,” you could work on a novel or you could work on a short story, and from a marketability standpoint, those are two different propositions. So what is it about a short story that makes you say, “I’m going to take some time, and I am going to write this”?
Alex: I love the short story format. It’s honestly one of my favorites for simply exploring an idea. A bolt of an idea is often where I start with a short story, and how big or how small it is is absolutely determined by where that idea takes me. I usually have the concept, and oftentimes I’ll have the ending in mind before I start the story itself.
I love the novel form, I do. I have written a few novels, and I have one that just came out. But I find novels are more about multiple ideas you have to connect together, versus being able to circle around a single concept and tease out that idea and explore it—almost like a philosophical question. That’s often how I approach my short stories.
Brian: In addition to writing relatively straightforward science fiction like this story, you also write cosmic horror, and the Euler circles there can overlap quite a bit. But as somebody who also enjoys cosmic horror, but also asks myself why I enjoy it, I’m wondering: have you wrestled with that question? What is it about cosmic horror as a genre that speaks to us? Because it’s not warm and fuzzy.
Alex: Not at all. I think with a lot of horror, but especially cosmic horror, it’s about how we as people deal with the idea of things that are just so much bigger than us—so much more vast, so far beyond our understanding. A lot of it is cathartic. A lot of it is us processing the idea of something so large and so frightening that it doesn’t even know us. Cosmic horror is ultimately about the unknowability of the universe.
I also consider it a little transcendentalist. I see cosmic horror as something that goes hand in hand with the power of nature—like a storm that’s bearing down on you. The clouds are beautiful, but there’s absolutely nothing you can do about the damage it might wreak upon the world around you. For me, that’s the core.
Brian: So it’s kind of a dark, poetic presentation of something that’s very real, which is that the universe is out there, we understand very little about it, and it doesn’t care about us.
Alex: It doesn’t care about us. It’s up to you to find what meaning matters to you.
Brian: Okay, excellent. Thank you. There’s a question I like to ask most of my guests: Is there a speculative fiction story—a short story or novel—that you feel is underappreciated and that you’d like to share with the world? Like, “Hey, you may not have heard of this, or maybe you’ve heard of it but never actually taken the time to read it, but you should.”
Alex: Oh, that’s a very good question. I’ve read a few recently. I’m trying to think of a really, really good one. God, what was the title? There was one that ran in Clarkesworld a number of years ago. It got shortlisted for a bunch of things, but I feel like not enough people read it. It was an absolutely beautiful story about a starship that was created from two different starships. It was a fighter ship, and it was sentient, and it had the memories of both of those ships in it. It was about the ship grappling with those memories as it was on yet another horrible mission as part of the war machine it was created for. [Editor’s Note: “Damage,” by David D. Levine, Tor.com (now Reactor), 2015]8 It was such a good story. I’m so sorry, I’m blanking.
Brian: No, no, that is a fascinating premise. If you can look it up when we’re done and send it to me, I will add it to the…
Alex: Absolutely. I can find it instantly. It was such a story.
Brian: Now I want to know about it.
Alex: Yeah. It stuck with me.
Brian: Well, that’s great, thank you very much, because I agree with you. I think science fiction short stories are worth reading in their own right, and they do something different than a novel does. They’re kind of a mental exercise in trying to get into a story that isn’t very long, and maybe even figure out what’s happening before the end. So I love when people bring up things I haven’t heard about before, and hopefully my listeners and readers will also find it interesting.
Well, Alex, is there anything else you would like to share about your science fiction and speculative fiction journey, your writing journey, anything you’re working on or have coming up, before we wrap up?
Alex: Yeah. My debut novel, Angel Country, has just come out.9 As we’ve been discussing, it’s cosmic horror. It’s an alternate-universe 1904 United States that has become beset by biblically accurate angels.
Yes, it’s a lot. It’s very much an experimental form, in that it’s written from the point of view of a scientist who was researching these angels and who is sort of falling apart as she’s telling the story.
Brian: Well, that sounds fantastic. I’m a big believer that science fiction is a huge, huge genre. Every year I try to spread my reading across the different award winners, but one thing I always try to read is the Sidewise Award winner.10 I just finished B. L. Blanchard’s The Peacekeeper.11 It goes back to the original short story, “Sidewise in Time,” which I love.12 That was my first introduction to this whole idea of, “Whoa, we can have stories about alternate timelines and stuff.”
So that sounds great. I’ll be looking forward to your novel coming out [Editor’s note: Angel Country was released October 20, 2026; see note 10.], and congratulations on your novel. And thank you so much. I really appreciate you joining us. This has been a fantastic conversation, and I wish you well in your future writing endeavors. Maybe you can come back on the podcast sometime and give us an update.
Alex: I’d be happy to. Thank you very much.
Brian: All right, thanks, Alex. Take care.
Alex: You too. Take care.
Thoughts about my interview with Alex T. Singer? Please comment below!
Artificial intelligence tools performed multiple tasks in the creation and publication of this article.
This month, I’m sharing my thoughts about Michael Flynn’s Prometheus Award-winning novel In the Belly of the Whale on Club Codex, where any Cosmic Codex subscriber can follow along, comment, or ask questions.
Here’s my latest comment in the discussion thread:
”This sort of novel is definitely my jam!
“While I’d prefer most of the exposition in the prologue had been handled via dialog, the two opening paragraphs capture the spirit of an epic:
“‘All this happened a great long time ago, by which we mean not merely that it was long ago but also that it was great. It was an age of drama and romance, of farce and adventure. Everything was bigger; everything was grander. Heroes were more heroic, lovers more lovely, traitors more treacherous, conflicts more conflicted. There were spaceships bigger than mountains. There were spaceships that WERE mountains.
“‘People dared greatly, and so, failed greatly. At times, they even achieved greatly. This is the story of one of their achievements.’
“And, intentionally or not, Flynn here echoes Douglas Adams’ satire in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”:
“‘In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.’”
Click below to participate:
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Herman Melville’s novel was first published in London in October 1851 as The Whale, and a month later in New York as Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. See “What Is Moby Dick?,” Encyclopædia Britannica.
Alex’s grandfather was the novelist Loren Singer (1923–2009). According to his New York Times obituary, the Office of Strategic Services sent him to Yale to study Malay, but World War II ended before he could be sent to the Far East. William Grimes, “Loren Singer, ‘Parallax View’ Author, Dies at 86,” The New York Times, December 23, 2009.
Loren Singer’s novel The Parallax View (1970) was adapted as the 1974 film directed by Alan J. Pakula and starring Warren Beatty. See the AFI Catalog entry for The Parallax View (1974).
The Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, presented by the J. Wayne and Elsie M. Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas, honors the best science fiction short story published the previous year. A jury chose “We, the Fleet” for the 2026 award. See the Gunn Center’s Sturgeon Award page.
Alex T. Singer, “We, the Fleet,” Clarkesworld, May 2025.
Since 2022, the Gunn Center has presented the Sturgeon Award at its annual Sturgeon Symposium in Lawrence, Kansas. The 2026 ceremony, part of the fifth symposium, was scheduled for October 15, 2026, at the Hall Center for the Humanities and included a reading by Singer. See the Gunn Center’s Sturgeon Award page.
Pulp fiction magazines were a cheap form of popular entertainment that emerged just before 1900, reached their peak popularity in the 1930s, and faded by the early 1950s. Science fiction’s first dedicated magazine, Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories, appeared in 1926, followed by Astounding Stories in 1930. See Randy Duncan, “Pulp Magazines,” St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, via Encyclopedia.com.
First published on Tor.com, rather than in Clarkesworld, on January 21, 2015. It was a Nebula Award nominee for best short story and a Sturgeon Award finalist; see Levine’s page in the Science Fiction Awards Database.
Alex T. Singer, Angel Country (Saga Press, October 20, 2026). The publisher describes it as cosmic horror set in an alternate 1904, where angelic infestations have kept the original thirteen colonies from expanding.
The Sidewise Awards for Alternate History, conceived in 1995, are presented annually in long-form and short-form categories. See “Sidewise Award,” The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.
B. L. Blanchard’s The Peacekeeper (47North, 2022) won the 2022 Sidewise Award for long-form alternate history. The winners were announced October 27, 2023, at the World Fantasy Convention in Kansas City, Missouri. See “2022 Sidewise Award Winners,” Locus, and note 11.
Murray Leinster’s story “Sidewise in Time” appeared in the June 1934 Astounding; the Sidewise Awards are named in its honor. See note 11.
