History That Never Was

DV: Tell us a little about yourself and your writing.

AH: Hi! My name is Ada Hoffmann. My pronouns are they/them. I live in Canada, teach cognitive science at a university, and write stories. I also have a huge interest in neurodiversity. My best-known book is The Outside, a queer neurodivergent cosmic horror space opera, which is actually the start of a completed trilogy, and which was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick award.

DV: How did you select the themes and pieces you put together for your forthcoming collection, Resurrections?

AH: I like to have stories that look wildly different from each other at first glance, but that still follow a unifying theme. For Resurrections, the first thing I knew was what stories I wanted at the beginning and end: “Variations on a Theme from Turandot,” which is a bit of timey-wimey metafiction that got into The Year’s Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, and “I Sing Against the Silent Sun,” a sweeping space opera that I co-wrote with Merc Fenn Wolfmoor. What these pieces had in common was a feeling of death and rebirth. In “Variations,” a major character dies every time the opera is performed, and as she grows more aware of the loop she’s in, she looks for ways to subvert the story and maybe survive. In “Silent Sun,” the protagonist is a revolutionary who is captured, tortured, and silenced. It takes them a long time to find the strength to speak again; but when they do, it’s with a powerful oration that literally changes the galaxy.

So I thought about how to fit a book’s worth of other stories between these two. The first scene of “Variations” has the character waking up to what’s happening for the first time, noticing that she is dying and has died before. The ending of “Silent Sun,” despite everything, is triumphant. Between these two points I constructed an arc: first, a set of stories that descend, either into death or into some metaphorical underworld; a middle section where characters are stuck in the darkness together, trying in well-meant but flawed ways to help each other; a final section where they claw their way back out in earnest. While I’m not a very religious person, I have fond memories of Holy Week services and so the three-part pattern is loosely inspired by Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday. Eventually I also added a short fourth section, with a few brighter, more insightful, or lighter-hearted moments to cleanse a reader’s palate in between the middle section and the end.

DV: As someone who is a tabletop and live-action gamer, how does that hobby influence your writing?

AH: You know, I feel really out of practice at both of these things. But the biggest influence gaming has had on me is that it’s given me some of my favorite characters. I love the spark that happens when you’re being a fictional person with all your might, and another player is also being a fictional person with all their might, and you bounce off each other in ways that you never would have as yourselves. Some of the major characters of the Outside books – at least one of whom also appears in Resurrections – were adapted, with player consent, from a roleplaying game.

DV: What is the coolest thing about being an author?

AH: Getting to make up stories all the time! This is my favorite thing to do. The second coolest thing is the way I can look at my stories after I’m finished them, or sometimes even before that, and learn something about myself from what I’ve written.

DV: What’s next for you in the writing world?

AH: As I write this, I’ve got two novel-length manuscripts in various stages of revision. One is high fantasy, and one is sci-fi set in the near-ish future; neither one has anything to do with the Outside series. One, I wrote at a slow and steady pace in the year after releasing the last Outside book; the other, I drafted in an uncontrollable fury in just a few months. Both are super queer. We’ll see what happens

DV: Where can folks find you online?

AH: I’ve got a website at ada-hoffmann.com with my full bibliography plus autistic book reviews; a newsletter at adahoffmann.substack.com; and a Bluesky account at ada-hoffmann.bsky.social.