Outer Space, Bacon, and Dreams: Authors Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff on the Origins of Illuminae

Illuminae began as dream. We wish we had a cooler story to explain how this book was born, because we think the book itself turned out quite cool.
Amie and I met through a mutual friend, and as authors are wont to do, we used to meet up every month or so to talk shop over brunch. One fateful Sunday, she wandered into Joe’s Garage (goooood bacon) and told me she’d dreamed we wrote a book together. She couldn’t remember what the dream book was about, sadly, just that it was written in emails.
We laughed about it and hit Joe’s bacon like it owed us money. But the next time we met, we decided writing a book together wasn’t such a crazy idea at that. I’d never coauthored a novel before, but I realized the worst thing that could happen was we’d end up hating each other, and most people find me disagreeable after a few months anyway.
So we knew the book would be about a Girl and a Boy. Ultimately, most books are. As per the dream, our Girl and Boy would be talking to each other via email. So the first big question was, “Why don’t they just talk face to face?”
The solution, of course, was that they were separated—by thousands of miles of interstellar space, it turns out. Fleeing their exploding colony aboard a limping evacuation fleet. Each stranded on a different vessel, sending messages back and forth across the void in hopes of solving the mystery unfolding on their ships. But right away, the tone was set; Illuminae was a book that would have its format determined by its plot, but also see its plot governed by its format. Like our Girl and Boy, the two elements were inextricably linked. Illuminae wouldn’t just be a story. The book you held in your hands, the object itself, was going to be part of that story. And we were going to break every rule we knew about what a book should be.
We divided the labor along character lines at first: Amie would write the Girl (or Grrl, as she turned out to be), and I’d write the Boy. But soon enough, those lines began to blur, as more characters joined the cast, as the format of documents mutated and multiplied along with the virus in the evacuation fleet’s belly, as an insane AI reared its head and became not just an adversary, but a narrator that twisted the format of the book even further than we’d planned.
We laid out some scenes meticulously. Completely ad-libbed others, without any kind of roadmap or design. We plotted only about 100 pages ahead—the story was evolving as we wrote it, becoming something bigger and deeper than we’d imagined. No idea was too outlandish, no suggestion too silly. We’d been told “Sci-fi is dead,” that editors weren’t interested in stories set in space. So we wrote Illuminae as if we were the only two people who’d ever read it. We wrote it because we had no choice. Because it was just too much fun not to write.
When Illuminae was acquired by Random House, things got even bigger. Our amazing editor, Melanie Cecka, not only wasn’t put off by the collision of design and story, she encouraged it. We worked with an amazing design team, pulled in illustrators and graphics gurus. We even got our own spaceship designer—how many authors can say that?
The idea was to create a book unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. To push the boundaries of what a book could do—and be! Communication on this planet is evolving at unbelievable speed. A generation raised on books and newspapers is now giving way to a generation raised on Facebook and Twitter, but long-form literature hasn’t really changed in hundreds of years. We decided to see what we could do about that. Like I say, we think it turned out pretty cool.
But to start with, it was only just a dream.
Maybe that’s a cool story after all.
Illuminae is on sale October 20, and available for pre-order now.