​Walking on the Sea: A Novel
On a climate-ravaged Nantucket, a woman defies an emerging artificial intelligence that governs the island’s future—and risks everything to protect a child whose very existence challenges the boundaries of human freedom, love, and what it means to be alive.
The Story Behind the Story
In 2008, I was in New York City on a research trip, interviewing scientists and engineers whose inquiries and experiments were taking place at the nanoscale. After two full days of visiting their laboratories and talking with them about the ethical implications of their research, I fell asleep early that second night with a lot on my mind.
Around 1:00 a.m., I suddenly sat upright in the hotel room, wide awake. I turned on the light, reached into my backpack for a pad of lined paper and a pen, and began to write. I wrote until dawn. Then I tore the pages from the pad, stuffed them into the side pocket of my backpack, and started my day.
Months later, rummaging through that same backpack, I found the wad of 23 handwritten pages and read them for the first time.
They were a short story set in the near future on Nantucket. At its center was a pregnant woman named Oriana, under threat from an artificially intelligent system called VISHNEW.
I had no idea then what that story would become.
A Hedgebrook writing retreat later provided the focused, intentional space I needed to bring it into draft form. The story eventually became Waiting in the Silence, which was adapted into an audio drama in 2024, and ultimately grew into the novel Walking on the Sea.