Australian author Amie Kaufman is in Singapore to research the near future for a novel.
The 39-year-old, who is also visiting friends here, thinks a science-fiction author can pick up a lot of world-building tips from Singapore.
She is especially enthused by the ArtScience Museum exhibition 2219: Futures Imagined, in which artists, architects, writers and more envision what the country might be like in 200 years' time, from the contents of a flat in a flooded city to the 100th National Day Parade of a subterranean Singapore.
"Those are the sorts of detail you want when you're writing," says Kaufman, who arrived in Singapore last week with her husband and seven-month-old daughter. "Bad writing tells you every single thing about the room you're in. But if you have just two or three of the right details, the room comes to life for the reader on its own."
Kaufman and her co-author Jay Kristoff are behind The New York Times best-selling young adult scifi trilogy The Illuminae Files (2015 to 2018) and have embarked on a new space opera series. Its first book, Aurora Rising, came out earlier this year and its second, Aurora Burning, will be out next year.
Both have been picked up for screen deals. Illuminae is being developed as a film by Brad Pitt's production company Plan B Entertainment and Warner Bros, while MGM (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) Television plans to turn Aurora Rising into a TV series.
MGM is also developing the Starbound trilogy (2013 to 2015), which Kaufman co-wrote with American author Meagan Spooner, for TV.
In Aurora Rising, set in the year 2380, a derelict spaceship that Earth lost track of 200 years ago is discovered in interdimensional space, full of thousands of dead bodies and one survivor: Aurora Jie-Lin O'Malley, 17, who has been in cryo-sleep for two centuries.
Tyler Jones, the cadet who risks his life to pull Aurora from the ship before its destruction, has problems of his own.
He has spent his life training to lead a squad for the Aurora Legion, a galactic peacekeeping force, but his rescue of Aurora has caused him to miss the Draft, during which he would have had his pick of teammates from his cohort.
Now he must make do with the academy's dregs.
But when it turns out that Aurora could be the catalyst for a huge space war, Tyler's squad of misfits becomes the only thing keeping her safe. Cue a heist, some daredevil flying and general breaking of the rules of the galaxy.
Kaufman did an undergraduate degree in immigration history, looking at how immigrants maintain their identity in diaspora. It is something she wanted to explore in the story of Aurora, a half-Chinese, half-Irish girl far removed from her home world in terms of both space and time.
Kaufman met Kristoff, who is also Australian, in March 2012 - Tyler's squad is numbered 312 in a nod to this - through the United States taxation system, as they bonded over being foreign authors who had to fill out complicated forms.
The Illuminae Files arose out of a dream she had, in which she was meant to meet Kristoff for brunch to discuss a book but had forgotten what it was about. When they did meet in real life, all she could remember of the dream was that the book had been about e-mails.
Together, they began writing an epistolary novel, which uses classified documents, censored e-mails and more to tell the story of Kady, a teenage colonist in the year 2575 who is still reeling from a bad break-up when her planet gets invaded and she has to fight her way onto the evacuation fleet with, unfortunately, her ex-boyfriend. The trilogy wrapped up with the final book, Obsidio, last year.
Researching space opera can be tough, says Kaufman. She and Kristoff read the biographies of bank robbers - there is a bank heist coming up in Aurora Burning - and have on call experts such as an astrophysicist, a friend who works at Nasa (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) and hackers who refuse to be named in their books' acknowledgement section.
People tend to assume Kaufman and Kristoff are married - which they are, but to other people. Kaufman says their relationship dynamic is closer to that of siblings. When they write, each usually steers different characters, but will edit the other person's drafts, so that by the final iteration, they would be hard-pressed to tell you who wrote what.
"Everyone thinks he's the one who kills off the characters," quips Kaufman of Kristoff. "Probably because he's more than six feet tall and has tattoos, they think he's doing the killing and I'm doing the kissing. But actually, more often than not, it's the other way round."
• Aurora Rising ($21.40) and Obsidio ($20.10) are available at Books Kinokuniya.
