People sometimes raise an eyebrow when When the Trees All Burned is shelved alongside science fiction—it reads like literary fiction, it feels like grief—but at its core, it is undeniably sci-fi. The apocalypse is triggered by a near-earth asteroid event rooted in real astrophysics: blind spots in our tracking systems, the cascading tectonic consequences of impact, a Trifecta of Destruction that NASA dismissed right up until it couldn’t. The technology at the heart of the story—ArkHive nanotechnology that burrows into the stomach lining and transmits biological data to determine who is “worthy” of survival—is the kind of concept that lives comfortably next to the best of the genre. A cosmonaut orbiting a dying planet, counting down his remaining days. A synthetic womb. A survival dome housing 200 carefully selected humans while the world burns above them. Science fiction has always been the genre brave enough to ask the hardest questions about humanity’s future—I just chose to answer them from the inside out.