Fiction Fans

Author Interview: Fermi's Wake by Chris Farnell

• Episode 178

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Your hosts welcome Chris Farnell back on to the podcast to talk about Fermi’s Wake, his new collection of novellas featuring the ragtag crew of the Fermi. They discuss crab-centric evolution, ego driven characters, and confronting readers with complicity via scifi shenanigans.


Find more from Chris:

https://chrisfarnell.com/ 

https://bsky.app/profile/thebrainofchris.bsky.social 



Find us on Discord / Support us on Patreon


Thanks to the following musicians for the use of their songs:

- Amarià for the use of “Sérénade à Notre Dame de Paris”
- Josh Woodward for the use of “Electric Sunrise”

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License


Lilly:

Hello and welcome to Fiction Fans, a podcast where we read books and other words too. I'm Lily.

Sara:

And I'm Sarah, and I am so pleased to welcome author Chris Farnell back onto the podcast, this time to talk about his new book, Fermi's Wake.

Chris:

Thank you. Yeah, it's great to be back.

Lilly:

Absolutely cannot wait to talk about this wonderful I think, Sarah, you said it's a collection of novellas is the official?

Sara:

mean, you should defer to Chris on this, not me.

Chris:

really should come up with a neat weight. Yeah, I think sequence of novellas is what I tend to go with, but yeah, really ought to come up with a word for

Sara:

And to, to clarify for listeners, I believe, and Chris, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that Fermi's Wake as a whole collection or, or sequence is not out. The first two novellas are available. And the third one is going to be out shortly after this episode is released. So,

Chris:

I, yeah, that's right. We're going out. What day is this going out again?

Sara:

I believe that this episode is coming out on the 26th, February 26th.

Chris:

Ah, brilliant. Then yes, two days. In two days it will be out. Yeah,

Lilly:

recently? Sarah, want to kick us off?

Sara:

Yes, so I attended Gallifrey One, which is a Doctor Who convention in LA had a great time. I was very sad when they announced that the con is going to be ending in 2028, but it was still, you know, it's a wonderful convention. And it's been running for, this was the 35th galley. So I'm not surprised that the organizers want to take a break.

Lilly:

my good thing is that I bought a belt. I will spare you guys the two and a half month drama that was me trying to acquire a belt. But I finally did it. So that saga is over and I can have a belt. So that's good.

Sara:

Congratulations.

Lilly:

you.

Chris:

This week Norwich had its Science Festival, so my good thing is I got to take my eldest, who's fourteen, to a planetarium show where they just have this big inflated dome and you've got to just crawl inside on your hands and knees and they just projected loads. of constellations and starscapes and stuff on the ceiling of it, so that was cool.

Sara:

That sounds really fun.

Chris:

Yeah, no, it was, I, I, you know, don't know how much they enjoyed it, but I had an absolute hoot.

Lilly:

Wonderful. What is everyone drinking today?

Sara:

I have a jasmine green tea.

Chris:

I had a really boring answer the last time, so I've done better this time. So this time I'm drinking an Erlenmeyer flask of health potion that I found in a tomb.

Lilly:

Oh, wonderful. I was going to drink tea, except, I mean, in honor of Gordon, I had to have coffee. I mean, it's kind of required. So, this is the dregs at the bottom of the pot because it is afternoon here now, but still better than some of the things she had to drink.

Chris:

Yeah, that, writing alien coffee substitutes was one of the fun bits for this one.

Sara:

did you have like a whole list of substitutes that didn't make it in? Or did all of your substitutes show up?

Chris:

They all made it in, but there was quite a bit workshopping different combinations or names or ideas for things that might go in there. Yeah, I've got a friend who's a scientist who I asked. About various bits of it, and I think it was them who came up with the idea. I think one of the solutions does involve coffee beans with a bit of human DNA in?

Lilly:

yeah,

Sara:

Yes.

Chris:

So that was, yeah, his idea.

Lilly:

just putting that one on him and,

Chris:

Yeah, absolutely. Nothing to do with me.

Lilly:

well, As a book podcast, has anyone read anything good lately

Chris:

um, today I just finished reading The Wild Robot Protects by Peter Brown with my daughter, and it's her first time getting to the end of a book trilogy. She's Five, and she's been obsessed with these books, so it was just brilliant finally reaching the end of that and seeing her just really psyched out for it. Yeah,

Lilly:

finished the section on salt and then went out and bought two different kinds of salt and now all of my food has fun weird salt in it and it's great.

Sara:

I have not been doing much reading aside from the very enjoyable Fermi's Wake because I was at a Doctor Who convention and going to panels. And reading the program booklet probably doesn't count as an answer.

Lilly:

But you did read Fermi's Wake, so let's talk about that.

Sara:

Yes.

Lilly:

First of all, thank you for catching me up. Because I did remember the main concept of the first novel but I did not remember the specifics. And so, going through the first part of this book, I kind of, I had a lot of, oh yeah, moments.

Chris:

it's weird starting the new cycle because it Usually when you start a new book, it does feel like you are having to relearn the entire book writing practice from scratch. so, starting something, I think, a few months to a year since I'd been writing First Draft for me. So, starting it. It was strange because so much of the work you normally have to do was done, but you also had to try and get back into that sort of rhythm with the characters and the setting again.

Sara:

So this story is kind of effectively being told on three different scales. Like there's the individual novella There's the collection as a novel and then there's also the series as a whole. How do you manage pacing for, for that kind of storytelling?

Chris:

Well, I think from the start I've tried to make sure that each novella is a unit and can function as a unit. That if you just read the novella in isolation you will have a story that has a beginning and a middle and an end. And so that is the main thing that you have to keep the pace for. But there's, there is a sort of trajectory for the entire series that has been more or less in place since I started writing, I've forgotten the name of the first Fermi novella Dyson Sphere. Way back when. There's been a sort of arc shape in mind. And then for this one,, I had all these individual story ideas. I had to work out which ones were going to fit into this sequence. And I had to position them so that each one would be different enough from the others. That, They would feel like four distinct things, while at the same time, I wanted to make sure that they were four stories that would hang together in a way that would feel like a complete thing. Because I don't, from the start with Furby, I didn't want to get into that thing of making people feel like they had bought part of a thing, whether they bought One novella or one set of novellas. I wanted to make sure however far into Fermi you got, you felt you had a complete thing. That you weren't being shorts on something.

Sara:

I mean, and I definitely felt that each story worked individually, but also that it, it does work as a sequence or a collection, so I think you were quite successful in that.

Chris:

Yeah, and of course with Fermi's, with Graveyard Orbit. Which is going to be coming out next. I then had to bring it down another scale.

Sara:

yes, I, I will say I think Graveyard Arbit is my favorite, of the, the four novellas in this sequence. I'm not going to talk about it too much yet, because spoilers, but I absolutely loved it.

Chris:

but again then, you had to do it in miniature. You were doing, because you had The sort of narratives within narratives, again, and each one of those had to feel like its own thing.

Lilly:

and speaking of narratives within narratives, the first novella in this collection features our characters playing a D& D session as part of a It's gonna say psychic situation and not get too deep into the specifics there, but we are obligated to ask, do you play tabletop role playing games?

Chris:

I mean, as much as anyone who plays tabletop role playing games, whenever you can get four or five people in 40s to agree on a place and time and date, then yes, yes I

Lilly:

Yeah. So do you have a preferred character that you like to play as? And

Chris:

Honestly, characters who are far too genre savvy for their own good. I'm the annoying player who tries to meta things and understand the tropes that we're playing into and try and work around them, if possible, bragging things long enough to not actually have to roll a dice. So, that tends to be, yeah, the character I play. That said, there's a game I've been playing Heart, by Roarock and Deckard, which is sort of very dark, gothic, dungeon crawling type game. I play the character who I basically just decided to do as Adam West's Batman. And it is so liberating playing some I mean, it's like writing Samson in a lot of ways. Just playing someone who is straight up heroic. Because in any situation, rather than having to work out the angles try and scheme or plot, you just go, Okay, what is the most heroic thing to do? that a sensible thing to do? No, I'm not going to do that second bit. Go! And just whatever happens, happens. And it is so freeing. It is really a liberating experience.

Lilly:

you got to write several different play styles for the characters in that situation. So it was kind of like, I imagine, playing D& D with yourself in that way, doing all of the different roles.

Chris:

Having written Fermi's Progress and set these sort of formats For those stories. Being the sort of writer that I am, When it came to doing a second series, I immediately wanted to come up with, How can I break this format? So, The main selling point is, story is a brand new world to explore. So, I'm just going to have the characters Sitting in a kitchen, Talking, For the entire novella. No one is going to leave the room, let alone the ship. We're just going to sit here and roll dice and talk for the whole story. And that was just a really fun thing to do as a challenge and as a way of just reintroducing the characters again and giving them each their own little spotlight to show who they are and who they want to be and what they think they are.

Sara:

So you have kind of just touched on this a little bit, but you really do play with format a lot in this collection or the sequence. The first novel, like we've just talked about, is a D& D story. Or the characters are all playing D& D, Graveyard Orbit, which is the third one, has this framework of the characters telling a short story the fourth novella overview effect has a fun framework that I'm not allowed to talk about just yet but it's, it's very fun and it sounds like this has always been your intention for this collection Or was it something that you started exploring during the writing process?

Chris:

It was very much from the beginning. The whole spaceship that blows up a planet each story format was designed so that each story was a new sandbox that I could play with in a different way. So even in the first set you had zombie apocalypse story, you had a Alien esque thing aboard the ship type story, while also the things we did with memory in that one. So, I've always liked messing around with the fourth wall a bit and bending the format in different ways. And Having established the format not as much as I had in the first set, this time I had a lot more room to just really mess around and do things that I wasn't supposed to.

Lilly:

It was also really fun seeing more from the non human character perspectives. How did you balance making them unique and alien while still accessible to the reader?

Chris:

really, really hard is the I know, there's three main things. alien characters in the crew and each of them is their own type of very difficult to write so the world is very hard because on the surface they're actually very easy to write if you're in a lazy mood sardonic sci fi robot is such an easy voice to slip into if you're not being careful So Writing them, you always have to remember, this isn't Spock, this isn't Hal 9000, this is something and older than anything you can imagine, but also it feels deeper. The world's emotions are so much more complex than the sort of chemical plumbing that we think counts as feelings. So, You sort of had to create this impression that the world that is interacting with the crew is more a sort of sock puppet that they've made to try and dumb things down enough that it can interact with the other characters in a meaningful way. Applejack, the challenge, was more He's just basically this guy. He is more similar to Connor than any other character on the crew. He works in a call centre. The main difference between him and everyone else is that he doesn't get any of the pop culture references. And is much more isolated, but is basically human. just all the reference points are off. And the discourse, the discourse, I had to go through a whole bunch of different ways of trying to write it before I found something that even worked for a bit. Because the discourse isn't a character, the discourse is a democratic civilization where each part of it is its own complex and individual entity. But we can only ever interact with it en masse. And so, You had to see it almost in terms of sweeping trends rather than moods or feelings. It was just what was public opinion within it like at any given moment. And try and write it from that perspective.

Lilly:

It was really fun watching our human crew members, you know, interacting with the discourse and sort of trying to make sense of them. And then when we do get a little bit more, you know, deeper into their thought process, feels wrong. But seeing how different that was, or, you know, correct from how the crew thought, it was just really fun to see that getting a little deeper.

Chris:

I think what you get into, the more you dig into it is, we have this, and Fermi uses it as well because otherwise it would be really hard, this idea of this universal translator. And the accepted trope is it just means that everyone can just speak to each other and be understood. We can't do that within English most of the time. And the more I try to write these characters, the more you get into this idea that what you think is people talking is just people pointing at the same pictogram and assuming that because they're both pointing at the same pictogram, they both mean the same thing. And that is so much of all communication that when you start to think about it at any length it becomes genuinely scary.

Sara:

Absolutely. So there are adventures mentioned in these stories that we don't actually get to see. Like werecrabs. I really want the werecrab story. Do you have any plans to write about all of these? Or are they just peppered in so that we can think wistfully about some of the stories that, that we'll never get to see?

Chris:

Yeah, my partner Ella is going to be glad to hear this because she has been really cross at me for not letting Samson tell the werecrab story

Sara:

Let Samson tell the werecrab story!

Chris:

It was just going into Fermi's wake. Very early on I just decided that cartonization, the evolution of things into a crab shape is a universal phenomenon. If you go to most planets you won't find something that looks like a human with a bumpy forehead, you'll find something that looks like a talking crab with a bumpy forehead. And it is so common That it is basically another Tuesday for the Fermi crew, and so we don't actually ever need to have a story about crab aliens, ever. All the crab people adventures, they happen off screen, they're just not interesting enough.

Sara:

A tragedy. I want, I want the Crab Alien stories.

Chris:

But also part of it, and there are some gaps that might get filled in later, but I wanted to, particularly with this one, have that feeling that this is their job by now. Their routine is come to an alien planet, land on an alien planet, and then what happens, happens. And for the sense that they weren't experienced in that at this point. So, very much wanted to feel like there have been loads of planets and adventures that we haven't seen and won't get to see or will only ever see or hear about in passing.

Sara:

Yeah, there's definitely a sense of time having passed, I think, between this sequence and the first sequence.

Chris:

there is of course a spreadsheet I'm keeping track of how many days they are and how many planets they have hit. So there are gaps but I know where all of the gaps are and how many planets there have been so far. So hopefully if anyone ever does go looking, actually all fit together.

Lilly:

Well, usually, before we move on to the spoilers section, we would talk about who should read this book. But really, you know, if you read the first one. Although earlier you did mention writing each novella so that it stands alone, and I was wondering, well, Having really enjoyed both of these, my answer is, yeah, start from the beginning. But maybe someone who's short on time. Would you recommend, like, is there a novella that someone could just start at?

Chris:

I've tried to keep everything as self contained. I think probably if you wanted to skip progress you could start with the Deception in Fermi's Wake. I think probably each set of four is a self enclosed thing. Or at least a self enclosed thing that includes enough backstory explanation that you won't get too lost if you start there. I designed this whole thing to be a way of telling small self contained stories. When you do it over any length of time, it is amazing just how quickly the history and the details start to build up. Even if you kill 99 percent of your characters every 30, 000 words or so.

Sara:

This episode of Fiction Fans is brought to you by Fiction Fans.

Lilly:

That's us! We really appreciate our patrons, because otherwise we fund this podcast entirely ourselves.

Sara:

Patrons can find weekly bonus content, monthly exclusive episodes, and they have free access to our biannual zine, Solstitia.

Lilly:

You can find all of that and more at patreon. com slash fictionfanspod. Thank you for all of your support.

Sara:

The remainder of this episode contains spoilers.

Lilly:

So We get some great continuation of character growth in this sequence. A particular favorite of ours was the relationship between Samson and Connor and sort of how that reflects their changing characters. But we also have Gordon's consistency, I'll say. There was some debate over whether she had changed. By the end of this book, or if she was still motivated by her ego, care to settle that debate?

Chris:

I mean, being motivated by an ego is great because you can turn that ego around to do so many different things. I think that the Gordon at the beginning of Fermi, before she's blown up the planet and all of that. She sees herself as a visionary and a saviour who is the only one who has that kind of ruthless pragmatism necessary to get things done. I think she might perceive herself differently over the course of these stories, but I still think that a lot of that description holds true. And I think, well, at the same time, I think when people change, you often don't realise the change is happening while you're in the middle of it. And usually when we change, it is by taking this whole entirely new thing and just sort of managing to insert it into ourselves in a way where we can convince ourselves that was there the entire time. So. I'm just as curious as you are, to be honest.

Lilly:

well, and despite that, and despite her being a sort of, what's a nice way to put it? Oh no, what's a nice way to put it? Her

Chris:

I mean,

Lilly:

Reminds me of some CEOs on Earth.

Chris:

well, I think last time we talked about how there were elements of the plot that, because of the way the political context had changed between me beginning and ending writing it, I had to Redraft things and edit things to go slightly harder and more explicit on certain things in the story. Billionaire Space Tech Moguls. that is a whole area that's undergone a lot since Fermi's Progress came out.

Lilly:

Yeah,

Sara:

Just, just a little bit.

Chris:

So, I think, I had to differentiate Gordon a lot from characters she might be associated with in the real world. And also, frankly, I was a bit harsher on her as well. She's still got a journey, she is still evolving and changing, but also I did want to be absolutely clear She is not Tony Stark. There is no such thing as a benevolent billionaire. If someone has got to the position where they are doing these things, they made some choices along the way that got them there. I

Sara:

And yet I would still take her over some of the billionaires that we have.

Chris:

think last time I said that Gordon would die of embarrassment if she suspected she was based on Elon Musk, and that has only got worse in the meantime.

Lilly:

it's, it's a minor thing, but as someone reading this book in the United States in 2025, it was actually very enjoyable how the rest of the crew just gave her no mercy. They did not let her hide behind a veneer of benevolence at, at any point, and that was nice.

Sara:

Yeah, I appreciated that. I appreciated that she is very clearly not a good person.

Chris:

And also I think the two really important things are, Gordon isn't a billionaire anymore, because all the money has been destroyed. And also these people have been living in a teeny tiny space with her for, I think about three or four years by now. They will have all been getting on each other's nerves for all that time, and Gordon, she's used to being surrounded by people who have a certain reaction to her. So, you know, she's around people who are having different reactions.

Lilly:

all of that being said, though, reading her character was not stressful to me. Like, I still maybe not sympathized with her, but she wasn't like a villainous character. She didn't make me angry. And so that

Sara:

I suspect we touched on this last time too, but she, she is still enjoyable to read about. Like Lily was saying, I don't, I don't hate reading her. she doesn't make me angry when she's on the page. I don't like her. I think she's a terrible person, but I still enjoy reading about her and that's not the case for every. character that's her level of bad person.

Chris:

I think there's a few things going on. I think part of it is she is very much The hero of her own story, in her own head, she has reasons for what she's doing, she has an agenda and a plan, and in her own head, it is the heroic thing to do. also, I think, when you're writing characters, if you have a truth that your sympathetic characters really need to hear, there is nobody better to tell them that than the worst person they know. And Gordon is just brilliant for that, if there is some horrible truth that somebody has to be told, she's great for that.

Sara:

So moving on to some of the other cast members or crew members, they are very, I'm gonna say aggressively human even though not all of them are human.

Chris:

way?

Sara:

but that, that allows them to make some pretty catastrophic mistakes while still being very sympathetic for the reader. Like I'm thinking in particular they visit this Frankenstein world and they think that they need to liberate the Frankenstein monsters and realize that was a terrible decision after the fact that they've gone too far. Can't change it, and also the world is going to be blown up when they leave anyway. But can you talk a little bit about threading that needle?

Chris:

Well, I think, when I first came up with the idea of the spaceship that blows up each planet it visits, it was doing a number of jobs, but one of them, is that when you look at the stories that it is, ripping off, you're very much talking about Prime Directive or not. The spaceship turns up, it lands on a planet, there's something dreadfully wrong on this planet. Well, we will fix it. We will give them democracy. Or freedom, or the human concept of love. And that is, if we follow that a bit further back. We're getting to some stories that aren't about spaceships anymore. We're talking about galleons rocking up on beaches. And it's not as heroic as we've now come to turn these stories into. And so from the start I very much did not want a spaceship. That was turning up and, you know, introducing democracy everywhere it went. But at the same time, I didn't want to do the Prime Directive thing of having a bunch of characters sitting around going, But should we really stop this genocide? So, from the out, it was always going to be the case that wherever the Fermi goes, Even before they blow it up, they are going to just make things worse and make mistakes. And even as they're trying to make good decisions, they're in an environment they can't possibly understand. Even the things they think they understand are just two people pointing at the same pictogram and thinking that means they mean the same thing again. So, yeah, I constantly wanted them to be just messing up and making things worse. And again, having that feeling of Being in this machine that is just doing terrible damage, and even doing the best you can within it, you're still complicit in this horror.

Lilly:

Were there any scenes that surprised you when you got to them?

Chris:

Hmm, let's think. I think when I first wrote the scene where Samson and Connor I think I'd suspected it for a while, but when it finally got to the reveal, that, in For The Trees, that Samson's entire persona is based on Banana Man. do have Banana Man in the states, I have no idea how well that travels.

Lilly:

personally not familiar with it.

Sara:

yeah, I'm, I'm not familiar

Lilly:

But I understood the gist of what was going on there, yeah.

Chris:

and just, yeah, realizing, yes, that is, his whole vibe is just going for that specific voice, and that Samson's whole performance is a way of making himself seem smaller, and funnier, and less scary, I think. Once I, I think that was something I was very much discovering as I was writing it.

Sara:

How different is the final product from the first draft?

Chris:

It varies a lot. When I was redrafting these ones, I think, when I redrafted D and Deception, It felt very much, as I was going through it, Like, it was already two or three drafts in, but it felt very much just like a polished job. You go through, you tighten up the sentences, you put things up. When I did For the Trees, it was astounding, because it was like this perfect negative image of what the good version of the book would be. was completely, precisely wrong. In every aspect of which characters were where, of who was experiencing which scenes, of what characters were having which discussions with who, it was all completely and utterly wrong. And I basically rewrote, restructured, just completely tore up the whole thing and put it back together again. But reading that first draft And realizing that did feel so liberating, because it was a perfect signpost to what the actual good version of the book needed to be, just by being exactly the opposite. That was

Sara:

about the fourth novella too much, and certainly not to go into specifics, but, how difficult was that to write?

Chris:

There were spreadsheets again. It was structurally very Very tricky, because, like we were talking about before, with the pacing issue, you have to pace each element of it, and make sure that whatever angle you are coming at it from, that you are creating something that looks like a story. I didn't want it to, those elements to Not fit together in the way you might expect to if it was a typically linearly told narrative. I think I got away with that. ha ha ha ha ha

Sara:

hard to kind of talk around things, but I, I think that was a, a pretty admirable attempt.

Lilly:

Well, I think we've reached the end of our questions. So, one final question. I did just use that word too many times. That's okay. Is there anything you would like readers to take away from this book?

Chris:

I think it was only when I got towards the end of Fury's Progress that I really realized what it was about in terms of the sort of the thread pulling through the whole thing. And I think this series goes a lot more deeply into that feeling which is. complicity, which is knowing that you get up and go to work to make money for someone who is going to do terrible things with that money, that all your purchasing decisions are supporting war crimes and climate crisis and every other bad thing. And I very much wanted to lean into that and not provide the very easy Stand up and resist answer, because it's so easy to do that when you're writing a story. And not a thing that we can, or that is easy to do in real life. And so, with this sequence, with Fermi's Wake, it's very much about trying to capture that feeling of trying to do good within systems that are pushing you to do bad at every single term.

Sara:

Well, Chris, thank you so much for coming on. We really appreciate it. Can you tell us where you can be found on the internet where people could hear about the latest Fermi news?

Chris:

Absolutely. Yeah, tend not to be on that other site anymore. But you can find me on bluesky at thebrainofchris. bsky. social And if you go to chrisfarnell. com, you'll be able to find all of my other stuff. And of course, Scarlet Ferret is the best place to buy all of the Fermi books. I get more royalties. You get to keep the e book, which is an increasingly rare thing now that Amazon's doing their thing now. And also there are some special bonus extras that you get from Scarlet Ferret that you will not be able to get anywhere else.

Lilly:

Well, excellent. We'll put all of those links in the episode description. I better go buy them on Scarlet Ferret, because I do need all of the extra things.

Sara:

Yes. Agreed.

Lilly:

So I'm gonna go do that. Goodbye.

Chris:

Brilliant, thanks a lot.

Sara:

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Fiction Fans.

Lilly:

Come disagree with us! We're on BlueSky and Instagram at fictionfanspod. You can also email us at fictionfanspod at gmail. com or leave a comment on YouTube.

Sara:

If you enjoyed the episode, please rate and review on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, and follow us wherever your podcasts live.

Lilly:

We also have a Patreon, where you can support us and find exclusive episodes and a lot of other nonsense.

Sara:

Thanks again for listening, and may your villains always be defeated. Bye!