[Post originally published: Apr 03, 2026]

My guest today is Ignyte, Bram Stoker, and Nebula Award winner, and Hugo, Astounding, Locus, Aurora, and BFSA Award finalist Ai Jiang, who is about to publish her book A River From the Sky, by Titan Books. Ai is one of my favorite writers and also a great friend, so it’s a huge honor to have her here!

Timely, Ai Jiang just revealed the cover of her novel An Empire in the Clouds, and it’s gorgeous!

You can find her on Instagram at: https://www.instagram.com/ai.jian.g/

Tell me more about something you have published recently (or will publish soon) and what made you write it.

A River From the Sky, the second book of the Nature Engines series, is forthcoming April 2026. And I remember when I’d first began collecting ideas for the book, I’d wanted to focus on the concept of misinformation and misinformation spread. However, as I started writing it, it became not only just the original idea but branched out into an exploration of the dangers and consequences of technology and innovation, as well as the sacrifices that come with development and progress.

What is an underrated piece of fiction that you think didn’t get enough attention?

I’m not sure if it’s considered underrated or not, but I really enjoyed Villain Hitting for Vicious Little Nobodies by Lindsay Wong which explores the complexities and messiness of family and sibling relationship through an unsettling narrative of corpse marraiges.

Show me an illustration that you love and tell me why!

An illustration I love is the cover art for Linghun, which the artist (Mateus Roberts) had originally titled The Fall of House Usher. I remember sending along some cover inspiration to my editor Rob Carroll, and most of them were some form of right-side-up haunted house with various abstractions and colour-schemes whether bold or muted, and Rob had come back with this artwork with Mateus, which I thought was an absolute perfect fit for the book where I attempt to turn the typical trope of the haunted house and ghost hauntings upside down.

You write a lot (among other things) about immigration, colonization, cultures and identities mingling (or clashing) with each other. From one writer to another, you have an admirable depth as an author. How is it to you broaching those subjects in your fiction? Where does it come from?

Heavy. At least for me, these are very heavy topics I often think about when I am having existential crises, when I am angry at the world and what is happening within it, when I am contemplating and unpacking the pack and how it has been affecting the present, and how what is occurring in the present will impact the future, and much of it stems from me considering the environment I have lived in/am currently living in, my family and their lives both past and present, as well as the turmoil within myself. I find what I often write about always comes in some facet from a very personal standpoint, whether it is through direct/first-hand experience or an adjacent experience. I suppose because these things are what I struggle with most, they ring most true both while I am writing about them and for the readers when it reaches them.

Let us show the newer writers that they are not alone! Tell me something that made you feel bad (a rejection, an empty signing session, a very harsh critique) and how you got over it (or not).

So they say that writer shouldn’t be looking at their own reviews, but I definitely have a bad habit of doing so, and I remember reading one review on a book I’d written that ran maybe a page or so long in a very elaborate rant that could be distilled down to something the review had said in the opening of their review, which was that they liked the idea behind the book but wished it were written by a writer with more talent. In terms of how I got over it, I think it really dimmed my positivity mindset for a couple of days, made me question myself as a writer, but I think about all the readers who do enjoy my work and why I love writing in the first place and found myself newly rejuvenated because those are the people I am writing for, not the ones who did not enjoy it. I started writing because of my own passion, and I hope that I can continue to do so for this same reason.