Somerville’s R.A. Dines drew on a background in tech to write “How I Hacked The Moon,” which aims to introduce scientific concepts and impart a love of science fiction to readers 10 and up while telling an adventure-filled coming-of-age story. The science fiction that Dines loves, though, is dystopian, and a primary scientific concept here is the dangers of artificial intelligence. This interview, from around the book’s formal Sept. 5 publication date, has been edited for length and clarity.
How did your tech background influence this book?
I’ve been working in tech for almost 20 years, and early in my career I was working in the data center facilities space – the large server farms where the cloud runs and now AI runs – and I got this silly, wacky idea that maybe you could run a data center on the moon. That became kind of the premise for this book, that big tech companies could no longer run their big AI data centers on Earth because of too many regulations and found a way to run really efficiently on the moon. It seemed incredibly far-fetched. Now it seems a little bit less far-fetched. There’s also some technological concepts in the book at an appropriate kid-level about coding and how AI and the cloud works. I really love this idea of being able to introduce technical concepts to kids in an approachable way that helps them both understand it and get interested in doing it themselves.
What do you hope young readers will be able to understand better about AI and the tech industry as a whole?
It’s more meant to give them excitement to go dive in and learn more. They’re going to get some base-level concepts about how code is structured and about how the AIs operate in a data center. I have a lot of companion texts that I’m offering to teachers about how AI works itself, because my goal is to get them understanding how it works and using it more responsibly.
What does that look like?
There’s been a lot of studies about using AI and how it can be potentially detrimental because it outsources a lot of the thinking that you normally do. Someone might say, “Well, how is that different from a Google search?” but what you’re doing is offloading a lot of the cognitive work when you use AI versus just doing your own research. It hands the answer to you instead of making you think about the answer.
We need to be really conscious about how kids use AI. I know this is a big conversation in a lot of classrooms, to make sure that they can still do their own thinking and their own research and their own reasoning and not just “I asked AI and AI gave me the answer, so that must be the right answer” – because it also might not be the right answer.
What do you see as the value of sci-fi as our own world begins to feel more dystopian?
There are certain near-future sci-fi authors I’ve always really enjoyed. William Gibson has been a huge influence on me as a reader and as an author. When you read these dystopian and near-future books, it makes you question today’s reality – is this okay? Is this normal? Because in these books you read these things and you might think “Oh wow, that’s ridiculous, that’s fantastical,” and then you might take a step back and see, actually, that’s not that different from what’s happening now. It helps people be less passive and engage critically.
That’s not why I write science fiction – I write it because I love to read it, and would love more young readers to be excited about the genre, especially more girls – but it does help us engage with our current reality with a new lens.
The book has local designers, including artist Karl Stevens, whom many may remember from the Boston Phoenix . Why was that important?
I grew up in the Boston area and I’ve been part of the community here for a long time, and it’s been so wonderful to have people I can grab a coffee with and meet with and talk face-to-face with about the book and get them excited and involved. I know the book is set on the moon, so what does that have to do with Somerville? But it’s still a really nice feeling. It feels like a neighborhood.
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