Episode 61: Lorraine Wilson, Speculative Fiction Author

Lorraine Wilson's 'The Salt Oracle' is a standalone speculative novel that blends dark academia themes with a slightly dystopian maritime setting on a bellwether floating college in the Baltic Sea. The story examines a character's confrontation with institutional corruption and privilege, set seventeen years after an internet collapse that released dangerous fragmentary cloud data into the world. Wilson layers rich natural-world detail, maps, and sensory description into her worldbuilding, using multiple viewpoints to explore character arcs and the social consequences of a broken digital infrastructure. She employs Scrivener extensively during drafting to manage points of view, research, and mood boards, producing tightly woven narrative threads without heavy-handed exposition. The novel continues Wilson's interest in folklore, ecology, and how stories—especially digital ones—shape identity and power.

Lorraine Wilson's 'We Are All Ghosts in the Forest' imagines a world reshaped after the internet collapses and cloud data becomes roving, fragmentary 'digital ghosts. ' Set near the Estonia–Russia border within a boreal forest environment, the novel blends speculative fiction, folklore, and detailed natural-world description to examine how stories and online legacies haunt the living. Wilson draws on her background in conservation to create textured ecosystems that play integral roles in mood and plot, while also exploring themes of isolation and the social effects of digital disconnection. The narrative uses sensory worldbuilding rather than heavy exposition, trusting readers to assemble the history from embedded hints. It is both a meditation on technology's afterlives and a character-driven exploration of grief, memory, and institutional dynamics.