Sam Seim

Sam Seim is, in the clinical sense, medically interesting — chronically ill, disabled, and reliably queer — and writes science fiction that runs on real engineering. Trained in electrical engineering and mathematics education, and in the final year of a doctorate in learning technologies, Sam is drawn to the exact moment a system gets misread: when a maintenance procedure hardens into scripture, and no one left alive remembers it was ever a checklist. That preoccupation produced a debut novel, The Clean Breath Pays the Debt, with the trilogy The Consent Engine coming soon. Sam writes alongside their partner, Patrick Seim, who works in network infrastructure, under their imprint Industrially Powered Magic — where the magic always turns out to be engineering. The arrangement is that Patrick handles the parts that have to actually work, and when a character says something unwise about thermodynamics, that one was Sam. They live in the Midwest, where Sam teaches and sings, and they spend weekends together building worlds full of magic and chaos with friends over Dungeons & Dragons.