Hey everyone — hope you’re doing well!

I’m deep into all things Birthright launch prep and promotion currently — more on that in my next newsletter — so no major updates on book #3.

In this newsletter, I want to talk a bit about the research and worldbuilding process — because a few of you have asked how I actually do that as an author. And you’ll find a small Birthright Launch Drinks RSVP for newsletter readers at the end of this post, if you’re in town.

So. Worldbuilding and research.

Whenever people ask “How does an author do worldbuilding?” my honest answer is: there are many different approaches — and it also changes from book to book.

For me, Birthright was very different from The Human Relief Project.

When I wrote The HRP, most of the technological and societal background was stuff I’d already been living with for years. Questions around purpose and meaning at work, how AI evolves, the different paths it could take — those were topics I’d read about obsessively. I didn’t need to do much upfront research. It was more about zooming in on very specific questions at very specific moments when writing the book.

Birthright was the opposite.

I went into it knowing very little about reproductive technology. I’d read a few articles here and there, since I’m generally interested in science and progress — but no real depth. Same with population decline. I knew we were heading into a century of drastically declining birth rates globally with massive negative impact on societies, and that fact was one of the key triggers for the book. But beyond that, my understanding was pretty superficial.

Where I did feel more grounded was education, developmental psychology, and — at least theoretically — parenting. I’m not a parent, but I’ve read a lot on these topics over the past ten or fifteen years. I’d even call education reform my first great passion in university. That part of the world felt familiar. Reproductive tech didn’t.

So before I really started writing, I read widely in places like Nature, MIT Technology Review, The Economist, or Works in Progress. I didn’t read a single full book on reproductive tech or the drop in birth rates (which I did for my next book). Both topics are so forward-leaning, that I couldn’t find the right book on them yet. Rather, I followed article to article, question to question — the kind of things I knew would matter inside the story, such as the current state of artificial wombs and how they might evolve; how longevity trends might or might not counter the decline in births; or what the economic impact of smaller societies might be.

When I felt I had stuffed my brain with more than enough information, I started writing.

The first manuscript is always intuitive for me. Not rational. Not planned in a neat way. I follow the plot, follow the characters, and write in one long flow. Only after that do I go back and ask: Where does this story need more grounding? Where would a scene benefit from a bit more technological, societal, or economic context? Where does something currently not quite make sense unless it’s anchored in real-world logic?

Plausibility really matters to me. I don’t want to write futures that feel smart but hollow. Even if they have low probability, I want them to feel like futures we could actually stumble into.

But there’s a real challenge here — and this was the hardest part for me with Birthright: Once you’ve done all that research, and you get very excited about it, it’s very tempting to put it everywhere.

In the second manuscript, I definitely overdid it. I smuggled in ideas just because I found them interesting — not because the story needed them. They slowed the story down, and dialogue stopped sounding like how people actually talk.

So a lot of the later work was about cutting again.

Homo Naturalis became a very natural place to carry background information and weave in parts of the research. That worked. It felt organic.

But there were other moments where I could have gone much deeper — a museum scene with lengthy descriptions of the technological details of artificial wombs, Mr. Pearl talking in detail about how the birth rate collapse hit the economy, or a class with Mrs. Watts on why genetics worked the way I envisioned them. All of that was possible. And all of that would have been too much.

Genetics is a good example here. I put a lot of thought into how gene editing in embryos might evolve over the next decades. But very little of that made it into the book. I didn’t want Birthright to become a genetic engineering novel, and it wasn’t critical for the core story — even though it’s something I couldn’t realistically leave out in a book set in the 2090s. So the science is there, quietly, in the background — present in Grace’s world, but rarely explained.

That balance between knowing a lot and showing very little is one of the hardest things about writing near-future fiction. Luckily, Grace as a character helped and kept me in check. As a 17-year-old about to leave her secure childhood home for the first time, much of the world is new to her, which made me build the world through her lived experience, rather than lengthy explanations.

The other challenge with near-future fiction is that reality keeps evolving as you write your book. And so, no matter how much you research, you never know everything.

Even now, with the book about to come out, and conversations about it on the horizon, the questions never fully go away. Did I do enough research? Am I versed well enough in the topics I’m writing about? Is everything accurate and plausible enough?

I’m not an expert on everything in Birthright. I never wanted to be. And I’m sure I’ll learn a lot from readers and from talking to people who know these fields far better than I do.

But I do feel I built a solid foundation — solid enough to tell this story honestly and allow my readers to feel what this future could be like.

Soon, you’ll be able to judge for yourself. When you have Birthright in your hands — or in your ears — you’ll see how all of this turned out.

I’ll also send a longer Substack post launch that goes deeper into the actual research behind the book, with links to some truly great articles that shaped it.

Oh — before I forget — I’ve reserved five slots at my launch drinks on Feb 21st for readers of this newsletter. You can RSVP here — first come, first served 🙂

Until then, whatever you’re reading: keep reading.

Always keep reading,
Max

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