By day, Michael Nayak is Doctor/Major Nayak at DARPA (the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). He holds a doctorate in planetary science from the University of California at Santa Cruz and additional graduate degrees in earth science, aerospace engineering, and flight test engineering. Real-world experience in the science and intelligence communities adds next-level authentic details and a touch of hyper-realism to his fiction writing. He talks with LJ about his debut novel, Symbiote (Angry Robot), due out in February; his tenure at the South Pole; his writing inspiration; and the work of DARPA imagining the future.

Your novel features scientists in Antarctica, and you’ve spent time conducting research at the South Pole. Can you tell us about your project and the time you spent there?

I’ve always been fascinated by space and the stars! I’m an astronomer by background, and as it turns out, the South Pole is one of the best places in the world to do astronomy. In most of the world, stars rise and set just like the Moon. But that far south, you are at a fixed point while the Earth rotates, so telescopes at the pole can track celestial objects for long periods of time.

That’s what my project was based on. During the months of dark winter at the South Pole, Jupiter would be up and brightly shining for over a hundred days continuously. I wanted to make very long-duration observations of Jupiter, for measurements of its interior structure never made before, but the South Pole is a harsh environment. It’s not so easy to just set up a telescope that can run that long without breaking down in the extreme cold.

So my time at the South Pole was leading a pathfinder expedition during the daylight season. The season might be called “summer,” but it’s still really cold! I tested some unique mechanisms for making long-duration telescope observations in the cold, to enable that future nighttime Jupiter science.

You can read more about the science behind the experiment that took me to South Pole here.

What made you decide to set your novel during an overwinter, particularly after having experienced a summer season in Antarctica?

To be honest, I still find the idea of overwinter at the South Pole absolutely fascinating. You and 40 other souls are cut off from the world. No possibility of evacuation. You’re stuck at this remote outpost, and you have to survive not just the cold but all the human elements that come with 40 people stuck together in a tin can. It’s like being astronauts in space. That kind of hardship bonds people together. Forges them into a crew with a unique chemistry that’s all their own. Forces them to work together in a way that perhaps they wouldn’t have to, if they had access to all the conveniences of modern life.

But as an author, I found myself wondering: what if it doesn’t? What if, instead of forging them together, something rips them apart? Turns them against each other? Then the unique beauty of the South Pole morphs. The persistent darkness becomes sinister. The little conflicts that naturally pop up between people take on life-or-death importance. Sitting at South Pole Station during my time off, with my pen in my hand, I looked out of the window and imagined what the scenery might look like with no sunlight, and my imagination took off from there. And that’s how Symbiote was born.

What else did you do in your spare time at the South Pole Station? What helped you get through your season there?

It’s 24/7 work to keep that tiny station humming. Might be shoveling snow out of the drifts, repairs to heat pipes in tunnels underneath the ice, or washing dishes for 100 people eating three times a day: there’s always things to do. To be a good teammate, you try to pitch in and help when you’re not working. It’s very much part of the “Polie” culture, and one of the reasons I loved my time there.

So that’s what I did when I wasn’t working at my telescope or writing. I washed dishes, picked holes into ice, fueled snowmobiles, launched weather balloons, dug in the snow for buried power lines…all kinds of random things. In turn, that’s what turned out to help me get through my season. Whenever I needed something or was having a hard time, there was always someone who would help me. I made some fast friendships and saw how the station ticks in ways I would not have otherwise.

And those little details are in the book. Symbiote is, to the best of our knowledge, the first novel written at the South Pole, and I was inspired to show readers a glimpse of what it’s really like to live there, day in and day out.

I talk more about what kept my morale high, and that “expeditionary mindset”, in a TED-talk style event called AFRL Inspire.

The publisher’s blurb about you and your book referred to you as a futurist DARPA program manager. What does it mean to be one?

DARPA has been described as “100 geniuses connected by a travel agent.” The other way I’ve heard it: “If you come to DARPA and you don’t invent the internet, best you get is a B grade.”

Other than being an author, being a DARPA program manager (PM) is probably the best job I’ll ever have. A DARPA PM has the freedom to imagine what the world could look like in the future. Then you get to work dragging that future into the present, by creating new technology. DARPA has invented GPS, lasers, rockets, self-driving cars, personal assistants like Siri, and, of course, the internet. I love that history, but you actually have to forget all that history when you walk in the door; your job is to make the future. And if I can convince the DARPA director that I have not just an idea but a technical insight by which to accomplish it, then I can put that out to the world and fund innovators to solve the problem. It’s an exciting legacy, an intense ride, and is probably why I can’t remember the last time I slept more than four hours in a night!

In many ways, DARPA and being a science-fiction author have a lot in common. You imagine a future. You try to ground it in reality. And it’s a bit of a trust fall: you have to believe in the vision so much that it becomes true. Sometimes I wonder which is more eclectic, my DARPA programs or my story ideas! It’s a toss-up, and perhaps that describes the job more than anything else.

More about my DARPA programs here.

There are multiple levels of scares, frights, and horrors in Symbiote, between the extreme conditions, the isolation, the mutating virus, and the real-world potential for the horrors of an incipient third world war. Which came first in your story process, and which do you think will be the most terrifying for your readers?

Having experienced them, I think the extreme conditions came first. The idea of being isolated in darkness, for months on end, is a psychological battle in itself. Adding the idea of a mutating virus in close quarters created a pressure cooker in my own head, and once COVID-19 went around the world and locked us all in, I knew people could personally relate to those scares and horrors. And it seems impossible to ignore that the world today is more and more like a pressure cooker. That brought it all together on the page for me.

For readers, I think the realism will be the most terrifying. It certainly was for me as I wrote it. The world of Symbiote is a world I think we could easily live in, if a few wrong choices are made along the way. As a futurist, I find that fascinating, and also terrifying.

And speaking of terrifying, the story is set in 2028, not very far from now at all. Why did you choose to set the story so close to the present?

Ralph Emerson wrote that “fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.” Almost every headline I read in the news suggests another major global conflict is imminent, and we keep racing forward anyway. I find that idea more terrifying than anything I could write. I chose to set Symbiote in a world that’s just tomorrow, instead of the distant future, as a cautionary tale. This is what could happen if we get carried away. If we allow certain sides of us to take over and define tomorrow. I would love for a reader to turn to the last page, and ask themselves: How much of that was science fiction, and how much of it was science fact?

What books have you enjoyed lately?

I enjoyed He Who Drowned the World by Shelley Parker-Chan and System Collapse by Martha Wells. Loved Upgrade by Blake Crouch. I go back and reread a lot of books, where I just want to soak in the feelings the author is dashing over me. World War Z by Max Brooks, Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn, Prey by Michael Crichton, The Dead Zone and Gerald’s Game by Stephen King, and one of my favorites: Lexicon by Max Barry, which is about the power of words.