Stefan Dahlström

Stefan in his own words:

I’ve always loved film. On the other hand, I’ve never been much of a fiction reader. Instead, I’ve devoured column miles of nonfiction. As a child, I became obsessed with the Titanic, and as an adult, I’ve geeked out over history—especially military history. Sometimes a bit too much. Don’t ask me why Russian tanks have wide treads and German ones don’t, or whether the Stuka dive bomber really had a siren underneath to scare the living daylights out of people on the ground. I tend to ramble.

This passion for film led me to start writing screenplays. From the beginning, I was struck by how rigid and structured a screenplay is. No emotions, lots of technical details, and incredibly terse. I always felt limited by the format because I wanted to say more than what a script allows. Writing in novel form gave me the freedom to play with words. After a few screenplays and several years of writing, a good friend said, “Why don’t you try turning your script into a book?” At first, I was hesitant—I had seen everything as images. I imagined that emotion would come through in the setting, the actors, the editing, paired with the perfect music and sound. Now I had to convey that same feeling with words—something I didn’t feel ready for. I didn’t even know where to begin. But once I let go of that fear, I discovered how much freer I was in book form. And, even better, I got the direct connection with the audience I’d been longing for.

The reason I started writing science fiction is probably because it’s the “perfect storm” of all my interests: history, the future, technology, social issues, and above all—politics and gender. The latter has always fascinated me, both on a personal level and as part of broader societal structures. Sci-fi is the perfect forum to flip our most basic assumptions, preconceptions, and fixed paradigms upside down. It lets us look in the mirror and ask whether what we’re doing is right—or whether there might be alternatives. It’s the perfect way to say something about our present by using a fictional future.

So, the book you’re holding in your hands actually began—as you might have guessed—as a screenplay, written as early as 2002. Turning it into a novel was a strange process. What I had most enjoyed writing in script form became the dullest parts to write as prose, while the scenes I had rushed through in the screenplay became the ones I stopped to explore in detail. I discovered new layers to my character—we got to know each other all over again. It was like falling in love with a teenage crush. To my surprise, I realized that this person—living on a distant planet in a dark future, with a completely different background—had so much in common with me. She was going through things I had experienced myself. It was like revisiting my teenage self. What started as a fun idea had grown into a story about life—about growing up.

That was something I hadn’t expected. And even after 18 years of knowing her, she still manages to surprise me.