Dear Reader,
I've always loved literary-leaning science fiction and fantasy.
I grew up reading imaginative, soulful young adult fiction, like Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, Lois Lowry's The Giver, C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia, and Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials (still my favorite books). Contemporary authors I love include Ted Chiang, Jeff Vandermeer, Emily St. John Mandel, Kazuo Ishiguro, Susanna Clarke, and Vandana Singh.
My first two novels - The Anatomy of Dreams and The Immortalists - take place in the world we know, though they have speculative elements. I'd always dreamed of attempting something otherworldly, but until Under Story, I wasn't ready to dive into a fantastical universe. Or perhaps I just hadn't found the right idea. In 2020, I came across news of ANITA, a neutrino experiment at Antarctica's McMurdo base. ANITA had detected
unusual results, which were then speculatively linked to the (also speculative) idea of a two-sided, symmetric universe.
I couldn't stop thinking about it. I had found the rabbit hole.
Over the next five years, Under Story took me on adventures I couldn't have imagined at the outset. I traveled out of state to shadow scientists working in caves. I attended a psychedelic conference and a smaller 'women's mushroom conference, the latter of which was as delightful as it was profound. I interviewed physicists and apple growers and clockmakers. At the same time, I was changing, healing from many years of chronic pain and learning to accept the whole of life: grief and joy, love and loss. After years of figurative and often literal darkness, life felt brighter than ever before - colors more vivid, moments more precious, my gratitude blooming.
Though chronic pain doesn't feature in the novel, Under Story is rooted in that experience. When I began the writing process, migraines prevented me from working on screens, so I used notebooks. Something I wrote very early was: 'Maybe it is suffering that opens up another dimension, or creates the conditions necessary to see it, dream of it, create it. Pain can be galvanizing. Without it, I may not have had the motivation to leave one way of life and cross over, into a new one.
I hope Under Story offers some combination of comfort, connection, and inspiration amid the realities of life in 2026. I hope it brings you back to the books you loved as a kid. I hope it makes you laugh, because it seems to me that a five hundred page book about mortality and consciousness and other worlds would run the risk of being far too portentous otherwise. And if it is not too bold to say so, I hope it makes you feel that change is possible, both internally and out there in the world. I know that I need to believe that right now.
I am so very grateful for your read.
Warmly,
CHLOE BENJAMIN
