I’m a graduate of the University of Chicago and a lapsed PhD candidate at NYU (where I studied racial bias in police shoot/don’t shoot decisions). I worked with Bungie Studios on much of the lore and backstory for Destiny.
You can reach me at sethjosephdickinson@gmail.com.
Iliekyourwrites.
Looking forward to reading the traitor baru! If you end up making a facebook page for yourself/your works, let us know!
After reading the Books of Sorrow, I had a feeling you wrote it. Bravo, well done!
Your book is awesome, btw.
Books of Sorrow is one of the most amazing texts I’ve ever read in a game and could stand alone outside of the medium all together. Just brilliant. Congratulations on its creation and publishing. I wish you could hold a talk on it. The destiny community would trip over themselves to engage you. I wonder if you’ve ever inquired about that… They really could use a boost to the lore right about now…
The Book of Sorrows and your other Destiny lore work is among the best fiction I have ever read; you managed to reinterpret a generic hostile alien swarm into a full-fledged fictional civilization, with a compassionate treatment that stirs up major insight into how people fall to the temptation of their darker impulses.
Sometime after Shadowkeep’s Unveiling book concludes, will there be similar material for the Traveler or beings associated with it? Or perhaps the Ahamkara, or Mara Sov? I hope you are given lots of input into wherever the story/backstory leads.
PS: I am in the process of seeking out your other work as well! What pieces are you most happy with/proud of?
If you’re interested in the Awoken and Mara, the Marasenna lorebook might catch your interest. I got to collaborate with some very talented writers on that one (who have done other great writing about Riven and the other ahamkara.) Jon Goff’s Dredgen Yor saga is also a popular read. Thank you for your kind words!
Marasenna’s also fantastic. I sort of assumed it filled the “in-between” role in relation to the Book of Sorrows, but on reflection I guess Mara’s most likely firmly aligned with the Sky, rather than some incoherent idea of balance between good and evil. I really appreciated that recent letter from Eris Morn where she criticized the moral relativism that’s “fashionable” among those going for edginess.
Are you currently directly involved with writing the Unveiling book? Of course, I am not sure how much you are allowed to say about current or future work, so it’s no skin off my nose if you can’t confirm or deny.
I’m also curious as to what that creative process looks like. For the collaborative portions, are there meetings and writers’ rooms, draft exchanges, all of the above?
I did have the good fortune to write Unveiling, yeah. Unfortunately due to time and money constraints the creative process is usually pretty solitary. I get a brief, write the story, maybe get some feedback by email.
Are you still working with Bungie?
Yup.
Heyyy, buddy. Scourge here. How have you been doing, plague notwithstanding? Just concerned about you is all.
Also, I’m finally reading The Traitor Baru Cormorant, and really enjoying it so far.
Hey Seth. Just read your The Final Order story from the From A Certain Point of View anthology. I really had a blast with it. Can I ask if the Alderaanian refugee convoy event Canonhaus is referring to is the one from the Star Wars: Squadrons game or something else?
I think it is, yes; when I pitched the idea of Canonhaus being involved in killing Alderaanian refugees I was told there was an upcoming project with a related event which we could refer to. I imagine that was Squadrons.
hey this is ennis, i just wanted to say how much i love tyrant???? i love the hallucination/tulpa stuff and baru realizing the limits of her conditioning and how she’s been conditioned and how there’s another, better way to achieve her goals!! I love the right-justified (or left? i’m dyslexic) text! i love the scene where she has meningitis and she’s hallucinating and she figures all the shit out!!! every time i read your work i feel like i am a gay who can do math, capable of both solving the trolley problem and writing a good book that i will actually be proud of! i know nothing about economics but i am delighted!!!
hope you’re not too bored, and that maybe you have managed to find some wild new quarantine hobby. have you read the locked tomb series? it’s about petty genius lesbians being terrible, so you might like it.
Amazing work on Book of Sorrows it is definitely the best lore in any video game. I hope you’re helping Bungie with Witch Queen I’d love to see more hive lore in Destiny 2 it’s kind of lacking it compared to Destiny 1.
Hi, Seth! I love your work and I want to send you a nice message. I was wondering, is the email listed here still your active one? (I know you’re not active on twitter, so I just wanted to make sure.)
Thank you very much! And yes, I still check that email address.
I just finished devouring your three Baru volumes and I am a fan.
Remarkable world-building and morality development.
Is there anywhere to read more about Incrasticism? I’d like to know more about it.
Also, are you a queer person? If not, I must say your understanding and writing about queer relationships is outstanding. Bravo. I would like to know more about the Princes’ choices/assignments of gender.
Finally, when is Book Four? I understand you deserve a serious break after Books 1-3.
Hello!
Curious if there’s any lore books or CE material in The Witch Queen you were involved in writing, if you feel like / are at liberty to talk about it.
I miss your occasional pop ups at reddit, despite the lore page being a mixed bag, but hope you’re doing well!
Hey, thanks for asking! I think any convo about that should wait until they’ve announced whether or not there’s a CE. Have they done that one way or the other?
Yes! Sadly I missed the option to order it, already sold out. There’s a Hive Ghost model and such, but they still have the details on the Bungie store. I’m hoping to do what I did with Shadowkeep and find a no game code box of the books and other materials on eBay in several months. So worth it for the manual explaining the Anomaly cladding!
Someone just emailed me to tell my that scans have been posted so I guess I can say that, yeah, I wrote it.
Oh Jeez!
Well, ok! I look forward to getting my hands on the book sometime in the future!
Thanks for replying!
Hey Seth! I wanted to ask if you lurk at all on twitter/tumblr and see fanart/memes for Baru?
The Masquerade series has really changed my standards for reading, so I wanted to thank you for that!
hi,
are there any ways or places where one would be able to read your stories :
The Immaculate Conception of Private Ritter
Claymore Three-Zulu
Hypocrite
Cannot find any websites or publications where it would be possible
Thank you so much in advance for your reply
They’re not formally published anywhere, and they’re sort of my baby college stories. Not very good imo.
Hey Seth! First and foremost: THANK YOU for The Masquerade! Easily one of my eternally-loved series; which spurs the question…
Will we get a Baru book 4!? Just re-read the series and am now fiending for more, hehe.
Cheers!
Yes, but not soon (as in, not next year, not the year after). I want to do it right. Also I am trying to ship what was supposed to be the fun book between Baru projects (written between Baru 1 and 2, even) and it has turned into an unending nightmare.
Is Exordia the fun book or something else ?
Thank you for speaking to us at the International Pilot Club Convention in Rochester, NY. You did not mention you were a writer, but I am glad Mississippi has you in government! Keep up the good work, Mr. Dickinson! I will buy your books and tell our club to do the same!
Whoa, hold up! Sorry to disappoint, but I’m a different Seth Dickinson. There’s a few of us out there.
I’m a bit late to the previous posts, only just found your site. I just wanted say your contribution to destiny lore is very much appreciated. Books of Sorrow, The unveiling are in my opinion great works and both I read often. Books of sorrow being my favourite and gives a different depth and perspective to the hive and their beginnings.
I will look for your other works that are mentioned many times in pist above.
I’ve just eaten my way through the Baru Cormorant series, and I love the subnautica games /, so I admire a lot of your work.
Just wanted to say loved the use of tribadism (rip for a lack of invert) as period appropriate terminology! And trans rep in the book is fantastic too!
Wanted to ask – are you planning any author tours soon?
Hi, Seth! Enormous fan. Any plans to put out a collection of your short stories? I know getting any book to print can be a bit of a nightmare, especially when you’re trying to collect a bunch of stories that have already been put out by a bunch of different publishers. But I’m just sayin’, I would preorder that DAY ONE if it happened.
No plans, for better or worse. Single author collections are always a bit dicey financially and I have a hard time reading my work and thinking “yes, I should put this all in one place!” But for whatever it’s worth the short stories are mostly all readable online.
Hi Seth,
It’s more than a half a year since I last asked you about Baru Book 4. Could you please give us ANY UPDATES about the book and how it’s going. ANYTHING you can give us would be better than a vacuum of information. You have so many eager/passionate readers who would appreciate a glimpse, a particle, a molecule. Please 🙂
Love,
Patiently/impatiently waiting
I haven’t written a word on it since I threw out the last draft, been focused on Exordia and the new day job.
Just found out that a great deal of my favorite Destiny lore was written by one person and that they have their own novel series… I’ve already bought the Audible book for The Traitor lol.
Your writing gives wonderful depth to the Destiny universe and her characters, and I’ve been wanting to read more of it. Hope that you might still be working with Bungie and that Subnautica is going well. Can’t wait to see what your series has in store!
Seth, thank you for your presentation on your upcoming Legal History of Mississippi book. I think it will be a great addition to the research collection at Ole Miss. I wish I could take your class! You are a captivating speaker and a great lecturer. I did not know you also wrote science fiction. I have ordered the first book and look forward to reading it! -MS
Hi Mildred, I am afraid you have the wrong Seth Dickinson.
Hello, Seth. I am sorry for that. I am not very attuned to blog posts. I remember when computer screens were green! I will still enjoy your book, I am sure. I like to read new things. Science Fiction differs from my usual fare; I have many user comments online. I look forward to being your new reader, even if it was by accident! -MS
I just read the excerpt for Exordia and it’s spectacular. I’m cry-laughing and regular crying within just a few pages.
Is it fair to say you think more about the genetic bottleneck than most people?
Have you done any writing for The Final Shape?
Good luck on the book release!
Glad you like what you’ve seen! I think you have to consider the genetic bottleneck if you’re trying to imagine humans as aliens – how are we different from other species? Well one obvious thing is, we had this wild population bottleneck. We treat humans as a drop-in default that you can just put in any fantasy world and they fit, but that makes no sense. Because to have humans you have to have the bottleneck. So what caused it in your fantasy world?
It’s all part of this creeping determinism that infects human thought, where we treat our current situation as the default inevitable outcome, instead of a weird contingent specific unusual branch of the possibility tree.
I have not written anything for Final Shape except of course the title. Nor have I been approached (nor told they were doing Witch Queen and Final Shape based on my writing in the first place).
Hi Seth, I would like to thank you for your kind responses to your reading community – my daughter emailed you to ask if you could possibly sign a copy of your latest book for her partner who is an avid reader. She just received it and her partner was absolutely thrilled, you made their day!
Glad it got there safe!
Hi Seth!
I had a bunch of thoughts after reading Exordia, and of course a lot of rhetorical questions I shouted into the void of discord chats but I do have one question that you don’t have to answer:
Did you have fun with this one? I hope you did. I hope you write more and keep sharing it with the world.
There’s a lot to admire with your word craft and fun characters.
I did, yeah. Maybe too much fun! I think I did a better job of writing it than editing it. There’s stuff that I find endlessly engaging and interesting and rewarding, kind of crunchy idea stones or technical details that go in my gizzard to grind things up, but to other people they are just rocks. Maybe I should’ve taken some of the rocks out…but I liked how some of those rocks sounded when banged on or blowtorched or crunched between your molars or what have you. So I left them in.
Hi,
Is Exordia a complete standalone? …
BTW – how is it going with Baru 4 ? 🙂 ( I have not asked this question for a while)
Thanks in advance
Hi Ivars,
I would like to write two more Exordia books, but we will see how sales go.
Baru 4 is the thing I am working on now, but the work is not going well — I’ve been busy with my day job and with some difficult freelance that’s taking forever. I’ve also been having brain trouble; I’ve been able to afford a specialist (finally) and they are gluing electrodes to my head and using neurofeedback to try to improve my focus and executive function.
It will come out, but it’s not coming out this year or next or probably the one after that. Sorry 🙁
Exciting to hear forward movement on any Brain Trouble Mitigation Measures! Love this for you!
Also, Exordia is insane and I ate it whole. I accidently pre-ordered the audio book instead of the normal kind, so immediately bought the book book when the audio book plopped into my library, but then, fighting my own type of Brain Trouble, ended up reading at times and listening at others to keep momentum up against the attention span demons.
I hope my double purchase has somehow helped in some small way ensure there are more books. I must know what THAT is.
Hi Seth, starting by informing you that opening Baru 2 and reading “A question: if something hurts, does that make it true?” made me say aloud “Holy shit.” The prose in these books is so startling (in a good way!) that I sometimes have to read sentences and then just sit for a second thinking about my life. Incredible work.
I was wondering if you have a pronunciation guide available anywhere? I have done some googling and found references to Stakhieczi and the “X” in Xate Yawa/Olake, and I’m pretty good with languages so have more or less been able to parse, but am curious about things like whether Xate Olake should be read as o-la-ke (with “ke” as it would be in, say, Chinese) or o-lake (as “lake” might be in American English) or something else entirely.
Eagerly anticipating whatever you’re working on!
Hi Emily! Sorry it took me months to reply. I am glad you like the prose, I can never decide if it’s good or insufferable head cheese. Sometimes I think I ought to simplify it. Like this. Just keep the sentence structures regular, with a comma or two. But then inevitably I return to my strange unpunctuated or overpunctuated ways, with semicolons; and when I go back and read it I wonder, “Does anyone flow through this, or is it more like trying to innertube down a river at low ebb, and the rocks are covered in rotting slime and rusty cans?”
The only guide I have is the x = sh thing. Otherwise, pronounce as you please. I confess that I have neither any inner vision (aphantasia) nor any spoken inner monologue, so I don’t need to ‘hear’ how a word sounds in my head to write it; for me what’s important is just how the word looks as a shape on the page. This leads me to produce some oddities.
Personally I say ‘Oh lake’ but only because I’m lazy.
Thank you for getting back to me! And in weirdly fortuitous timing, I actually finished Baru 2 the same day you replied, a nice little alignment. For what it’s worth, I like the semicolons, and the thing you sometimes do where you follow an action with a sentence fragment that describes some sensory response by the character to whatever just happened.
That’s really interesting, I appreciate you sharing! I also have no spoken inner monologue, especially when I read, but I do like to make all my friends listen to me talk about books and characters I think are rad as hell. The oddities are enjoyable. Thanks again for your response!
Hey Seth, I saw another comment and I’m really glad you had fun when writing Exordia, because it’s the best novel I’ve read. I was a massive fan of your Destiny work centered on morality and metaphysics, and was disappointed as Bungie stripped a lot of the themes away in retcons to make it easier to fit into the “shoot the bad guy” game setup, I didn’t imagine I’d get a much more interesting approach to many of those themes with Exordia, and I’m so happy it happened.
This is, alongside Alex White’s “Into Charybdis”, my favourite book, it’s the first time I read a book that ends in such an open way and I’m left so satisfied. I’m a huge physics nerd, though I had to drop out from my physics degree because ADHD made it impossible to actually learn the math, and while listening to the Exordia audiobook with my GF, I kept stopping and ranting about the physics you were describing and the impact they could have in the story later on, and I was so happy to see it consistently pay off as you involve real physics concepts and go the length of explaining them (doing a much better job of explaining the basics than most pop-sci physics educators, I must say).
I’m eagerly looking forward to your next work, whether that be in Subnautica (is that still a thing you’re working on?) or Baru 4 or Exordia 2. I hope you’re doing well and that Exordia makes enough money that you don’t have to worry about it for a while.
Thanks for reading this, if indeed you do, and thanks for writing these wonderful stories.
Into Charybdis, eh? I’ll check it out!
I am glad an actual physics person likes the physics — I suspect a bunch of it is wrong or at least handwaved in a way nobody who actually understands it would handwave, but, hey, it’s MY space opera and I’ll ruin physics if I want to. I too struggle with ADHD like stuff (or so it’s looking, they have done a bunch of brainwave analysis on me and there’s something going wrong) which often makes it very hard to write.
I am still working on Subnautica, that’s where most of my energy is — unfortunately for my book progress, but it has gotten me out of the roach infested shitheap I lived in until a year ago, so maybe having a day job is good actually.
Thank you for taking the time and energy to write me, it means a lot.
Thanks so much for replying!
Well, for what it’s worth, as someone who does understand most of the physics, even if I can’t do the maths, I appreciated all your handwaving as it was creative and actually fun! It felt like the kind of stuff you’d joke around in a physics class “wouldn’t it be cool if this was actually [thing]”. I’ll also say the physics stuff was done well enough that I was surprised the plot didn’t involve some form of the Holographic Universe Theory, what with how it’s intricately related to most concepts you introduce in Exordia, it’s a theory born out of the study of the Entropy of black holes after all. (I heavily recommend PBS Space- Time videos on the matter if you want quick introductions that also point to academic papers on it).
I also shared some excerpts with friends who are currently finishing their Physics degrees and going to do PhDs soon, and they loved it! A friend who’s doing a Physics-Maths double degree put Exordia at the top of her to-read list the moment I showed her the bits with Aixue talking about what she likes about Physics.
I hope you get some help with the ADHD, I’ve had some (very very mild) success in treating it with Concerta, you’ve already got the ability to put in a lot of work and have created plenty of great stuff, so I’m sure with some treatment you’ll manage just great!
I’m also glad to hear you’ve got a good living situation now thanks to having a (full time?) job working on Subnautica, that’s great. I was wondering though, seeing your comment on another reply about Exordia sequels depending on sales, does buying a physical copy of the book help the most? I got the audiobook but I’d like to purchase a text copy at some point, and I was wondering which version (digital or physical) helps more, since I imagine the cut that the publisher takes might be different, and maybe they value sales on one version more than another.
Hello Seth Dickinson,
Your books have given me a great deal. A moral worldview (to use when I need one), a connection to a loved one that bridges our incompatible neurology together, and (somehow) how scientists think black holes might work using the simplest explanation possible. I have learned five arbitrary things about science from Exordia now and I will treasure them in my hands like baby chicks. <__< Also your made up word game continues to be magnificent. (Cancrioth is still like, on my Top 5 Best Made Up Words Ever).
I don't know how to express how grateful I am for all this. At all. It's weird to say, "You have no idea what you've done to me, you blessed bastard," but that's the power of stories. Something you know a great deal about. We share a similarly intense appreciation of that power, for good or ill. "Gather round, gather round, tell me a story…" *Echolalic Princess Tutu reference goes off in my head*
Also, although you will never understand this bit, since it's quite idiosyncratic to me, but I could swear that you've "met Mar." Or found him in yourself, rather. "The Devil," that is, or whatever his archetype goes by these days. In your story he's Iruvage, and he's just one of an entire race of him, but still. You hate what he represents (and so do I), and yet know him very well. Enough to bring me a great deal of joy and delight, like a kid witnessing the sparks coming off fireworks, entranced, young again for a moment. I'm a sucker for a really good villain. :]
Anyway…Even if I never get Baru 4 after all, or anything else, what you've made is beautiful. And it mattered. Thank you so much, from the bottom of my heart.