After killing the most powerful man in the galaxy, outlaw V-Dot goes on the run on a sentient spaceship in the debut author’s The Ganymedan.

In this universe, artificial intelligence has progressed to produce fully sentient technology, but protagonist V-Dot doesn’t trust the sentients. Why?

V-Dot comes from a history of distrust toward the sentients and absorbed a lot of it growing up. Many sentients took part in the destruction of his homeworld in a previous war, and the stories of what they did were constantly being bandied about throughout his childhood. As he goes on the run, there’s also a deep-seated fear that any one of them would turn him in if they knew that he murdered LP, his old boss and the creator of sentient tech. The sentients represent a willingness to abide by the system’s rules, and V-Dot comes from a tradition of rebellion against that very system.

People also use sentient tech to create life-restoring backups of themselves. How does this affect their humanity?

In V-Dot’s view and in the view of the culture that raised him, sentience backups don’t actually bring back the original user, but a copy that’s convinced it’s the original. For people like LP who have used more backups than they can count, that just stops mattering after a while, even if they subscribe to the same view. In a broader sense, I think it became something that LP took for granted, and that had a corroding influence on his ability to sympathize with humans who have just their one life to live.

The ship V-Dot escapes in, TR-8901, yearns to maintain its relationship with a mysterious girl named Zaria. What’s going on there?

Zaria is quite literally a person who exists inside the ship’s head, but in the world of The Ganymedan, that doesn’t make her any less real than a physical human being. The idea for Zaria initially emerged because I wanted to convey the ship’s self-awareness in a way that lines up with the idea of a conscious being having a self-image, or some sort of mental representation of who they are whenever they introspect. Zaria is the ship’s self-image, so TR losing its relationship with her would be like losing its sense of self, or at least having it erode until only the machine is left.

Between V-Dot’s desire to destroy LP forever and the ship’s duty to turn him over to the authorities, who wins?

Ultimately, this is for the reader to decide. Both of these goals drive much of the plot, but a question I wanted to leave slightly unanswered for both characters in the end is “Was it all worth it?” They each lose something dear to them in exchange for getting their wish, but it isn’t entirely clear, at the end of the novel, who will be served best by the achievement of their goals.