First Step centers around the first human to step onto an alien planet and the Spacefirst AI investigating how another AI has veered dangerously off course. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

The stories of Eve and Ray originally started in my mind as two separate books. In the epilogue to First, the book prior to First Step, there’s a line in the epilogue where the narrator says Eve becomes the first person to step onto a planet outside our solar system, but that’s her story to tell. This is that story. I wish I could say writing it went smoothly, but I had several false starts. I wrote myself into corners, bored myself with my own storyline, and probably ended up wasting 40k words before I found a setup for Eve that worked. As for Ray and his story, I knew after First that he’d make a great narrator, and it’d be fun to write a book from the perspective of an AI. Just as with Eve’s story, I spun my wheels making the concept work on its own. The lightbulb went off at some point, and I realized combining the two stories with alternating narrators would make for a really good book. From there, I kept it simple with Eve and Ray trading narrative duties each chapter.

Did Eve’s journey or Ray’s voice come to you first?

It’d be nice to say Eve’s journey came first, but I have to be honest and say Ray’s voice. I wrote him as a sarcastic and funny AI in First, and scripting his words came to me easily since I think and communicate likewise. I worked through several iterations of Eve’s journey and at one point had her adrift on an ocean for weeks. Strangely enough, that didn’t work too well for me as the author, and if I’m bored, the reader’s going to be bored. My main intent for Eve’s journey was to be a struggle for survival, and how she overcame that and changed as a result. I think I found ways to make that happen and keep the reader engaged. Regarding Ray’s voice, I actually had to tone it down in several spots. There’s a point where his humor can cross the line and become annoying. For instance, he uses avatars of pop-culture icons when he speaks on the phone with one of the book’s antagonists. I cut out a couple of those interactions and edited others so those scenes didn’t overwhelm the book and become an instance of, “What? Another avatar? This is getting old.” In both Eve’s and Ray’s narratives, I hope I found the right balance.

The conflict between Ray and Ares raises questions about how AI evolves. What interested you most about that dynamic?

It’s a very important question about AI that we’re dealing with on almost a daily basis. The most interesting thing to me about the evolution of Ray versus Ares is that it’s very human. Early in the book, the question comes up about how and why AIs react to the same situation in different ways, which is exactly what humans do. In one simple example, a person wins a contest. One friend feels happy for the winner, while another friend feels jealous. In my story, AIs write and expand their own source code on the fly as they deal with different situations, so going back to the example, one AI writes a subroutine that allows them to celebrate their friend, while the other creates programming about bitterness, which may lead to revenge, etc. We already see the major players in AI coming up with different answers and approaches to the questions they’re asked, a sign they’re evolving independently. Just like humans.

Can we look forward to a follow-up to First Step?

I’d love to write another book with these characters, and I just need to come up with a good reason to inflict it on the world. The ending leaves the tiniest of hints that there’s another story out there. I’m letting the seed of that idea rest, and it’ll sprout when it’s ready. In the meantime, I’m working on a series about a survival contest on unexplored alien planets called The Drop. The first two seasons have been published, and I’m writing the fourth in what I plan to be at least ten books. I can certainly see myself taking a break at some point from that series and writing another book to follow First and First Step. I’ve been humbled and happy that people have responded so favorably to the stories and characters, and I’d be happy to visit that fictional universe again.

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