Artist Profile: Seth Dickinson on ‘Exordia,’ Obama, and Lego Bionicles

What do pink noise, the history of Kurdistan, and the Lego Bionicle franchise have in common? Answer: They all figure into Seth Dickinson’s sci-fi novel “Exordia.”

Dickinson, best known as the author of the epic fantasy Masquerade series, sat down with The Harvard Crimson to discuss his newest book. “Exordia,” a standalone novel, follows a Kurdish war orphan and genocide survivor, Anna Sinjari, as she tries to save humanity from an alien invasion.

The idea for “Exordia” first came from a fanfiction Dickinson wrote when he was fifteen — a story about an alien invasion set in the Lego Bionicle universe.

“My parents were worried that I spent a lot of time on the internet, writing really bad science fiction,” Dickinson said. “My parents were always like, spend more time on your studies, spend less time writing about Legos. And instead of listening to them, I wrote some fanfiction in study hall about Lego Bionicles.”

Dickinson later rewrote this fanfiction as an early draft of “Exordia.”

“It was about aliens legally distinct from Bionicle, invading the real world instead of Bionicle,” he said. “And it sucked. It was not a good book. But it was my first book.”

“Exordia” went through several iterations before finally being released as a novel this year. In fact, the first published version of “Exordia” appeared as a short story, titled “Anna Saves Them All,” in a 2014 issue of Shimmer Magazine.

“I had this theory that a short story is really just the climax of a novel. It’s where the interesting decisions are made, and the moment of maximum crisis,” Dickinson said. “It’s where things can’t go on as they have gone before, and something has to change. So I tried doing a short story version of the climax of the novel.”

Then, Dickinson began expanding “Exordia” into a series of novellas, or short novels, which eventually became the first and second acts of the final book.

“Each of the first two acts was an independent novella with a cliffhanger, and I think those are probably the best-paced parts of the book,” he said. “Because that novella structure, and the need to keep inside a certain limit, forced me to move at a certain clip, to move things fast. It feels like the first 50 percent of the book is a whole novel because there’s so much stuff jammed in there.”

Dickinson eventually rewrote “Exordia” as a full-length novel in between writing the first and second installments of the Masquerade series, wanting to write a “fun book.” His publisher, Tordotcom, acquired the project before the pandemic, but didn’t publish it for several years — a process that Dickinson described as “frustrating.”

But little by little, “Exordia” started moving toward publication.

“Every time it moved towards that, I would rewrite it,” Dickinson said. “And I think the book got a lot stronger and a little weaker from that process.”

“Exordia” takes place in 2013, in the midst of Obama-era geopolitics and 25 years after the true events of the genocidal Anfal campaign in Iraqi Kurdistan, in which Iraqi forces targeted and killed at least 50 thousand Kurdish people. The novel makes it clear that the atrocities committed against the Kurds, many of them caused by the United States, are not merely a thing of the past.

“It’s about growing up in the Obama administration,” Dickinson said. “You’re constantly like, yeah, Obama, we’re making things better. But also like, man, we just Predator droned a village, we blew up a wedding. How do these two things fit together? Why are we blowing up weddings? I thought we were doing things better. Do we have to be like this? Are we just inevitably blowing up weddings because that’s what it means to be the biggest and the strongest? Who makes these decisions?”

Despite the novel’s heavy subject matter, it was important to Dickinson to keep things light. He compared the contrasting tones of “Exordia” and the more serious Masquerade novels to his own experience with depression.

“It’s the difference between being deeply, painfully aware of everything that’s going on, and feeling it crashing on you — and being deeply, painfully aware of everything that’s going on, and nonetheless just hurtling forward,” he said. “There’s a certain carelessness about it, a certain ‘fuck it, we ball’ attitude that you just have to maintain in the text.”

While writing “Exordia,” Dickinson spoke with experts to implement physics and mathematics into the story, where concepts such as pink noise and Kolmogorov complexity feature prominently throughout.

“I had to talk to a mathematician. I would explain concepts I was trying to get at, and he would give me a sense, and I’d be like, this sounds beautiful. I don’t really know what it means,” Dickinson said. “But there’s a degree of reality to it that even a poet — I’m not a poet, but you know, a layperson — can understand.”

The characters in “Exordia” come from every corner of the globe, from a Filipina-Ugandan physicist to a Chinese mathematician to an Iranian fighter pilot. Dickinson also consulted several friends and expert readers to most authentically represent these characters.

“I have a couple of queer characters — women from China, from the Philippines. I was trying to figure out who their crushes would have been growing up,” Dickinson said. “And every time I came up with someone, like a DJ, I would want to find my friends from those places. And they would just laugh at me. They thought I had the worst taste in gay women. I never really did end up with good picks. They’re probably still laughing at it.”

After a lengthy journey to publication, “Exordia” was released on Jan. 23. In its final form, it’s become a novel about complicity in violence, moral dilemmas, and ultimately, hope in humankind. It’s also about spaceships made of math. All of these topics together create a sharp, action-packed, and deeply entertaining work of sci-fi that will leave readers excited for what else Dickinson has in store.

—Staff writer Samantha H. Chung can be reached at samantha.chung@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X at @samhchung.