Merritt Graves’ debut novel, Lakes of Mars, follows its 17-year-old protagonist to the space-age Corinth Station, an elite command school with Machiavellian students. In a world of interplanetary wars and artificial superintelligence, Graves focuses on tricky interpersonal relationships and atmosphere. (His band, Trapdoor Social, even released a soundtrack to the book, suiting its specific moods and tones.) This year, his latest novel, Sunlight 24,which earned a Kirkus star, offers a dark vision of suburban teens in 2030. Protagonist Dorian Waters must steal in order to pay for genetic augmentations that will keep him competitive with wealthier classmates—a scary and not so far-fetched metaphor for class and income inequalities.

Who are some of the SF writers that have most influenced you?

Even though they’re not sci-fi or dystopian writers, I really appreciate Kazuo Ishiguro’s…Never Let Me Go and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Any time you mix unexpected ingredients together, you subvert expectations and create the potential for contrast. It’s tough to get right, but when it works—like I think it does in those books—the payoff in terms of resonant themes and fully realized characters and relationships is enormous.

Besides its SF setting, what makes Lakes of Mars’ Corinth Station a unique school?

Probably its mix of being both intensely rule based but also a total free-for-all. It kind of maps on to our world in that regard; the people who are best able to identify the weakest, most malleable parts of a system—and then exploit them—tend to be the ones who get books written about them. The risk in lionizing that kind of success is that you end up viewing everything in terms of “Will this work or not?” rather than “Is this actually good for me or anyone else?”

What was most important to you to include in depicting 2030 in Sunlight 24?

It’s funny; the book took so long to write that the present kept catching up to it. And since I had a pretty specific idea about the ideal realism-to-speculation ratio, I kept pushing it out again. One of the risks, I guess, in doing near-future fiction.

But the most important thing was portraying the race dynamic that technological growth can sometimes take on, where participants prioritize speed over safety and resiliency because they’re so concerned about being first. This is bad in general, but it becomes an existential threat when corporations and nation-states are developing something like artificial superintelligence, where you get one chance to stick the landing.

Dorian has to make a lot of complex choices to navigate this world. How do you hope readers will connect with him?

Hopefully, they’ll recognize that his grievances are often legitimate. Extreme economic inequality is destabilizing in itself; layer extreme cognitive inequality on top of that and you don’t even get the myth of the American dream anymore. Any notion of equality of opportunity is dead. But addressing those grievances in the way he does can’t be the answer.

Have you found there to be advantages to releasing these books yourself?

Lakes of Mars has a fairly intricate plot, and I wouldn’t have been able to write it that way if I would’ve published traditionally. But then the risk flips since you don’t have someone to rein you in when you’re being self-indulgent. So, when self-publishing, I feel like it’s important to go out of your way to work with editors who’ll beat you up and challenge you. And build those checks back into the process.

What are you working on next?

For better or worse, I tend to have multiple projects going at once, so there’s always something to match my headspace. Among those is a novel about overfinancialization called Drive A as well as the two remaining books in the Lakes of Mars series.

Rhett Morgan is a writer and translator based in Paris.