James Breakwell’s new novel The Chosen Twelve is out now from Solaris, and in this short piece, the author explains his change of course for this novel…

I’ve built up a bit of a reputation in the parenting sphere. I’m the guy who writes about kids all the time no matter what. In my defense, they do take up a large portion of my life. I have four daughters, ages eleven, nine, seven, and six. Jokes inspired by our misadventures together make up most of the content on my family-friendly Twitter account, @XplodingUnicorn. I’ve also written four comedy parenting guides and one guided journal for kids to help them find the humor in their own lives. So what did I, the world’s most pigeon-holed parenting author, write for book number six? A dystopian sci-fi space opera, obviously.

It’s actually not as drastic of a pivot as you’d think. The plot of The Chosen Twelve centers on the last twenty-two human beings in existence, all of them children (allegedly). They’re being raised by robots, who hope to use the organics as a stepping stone to once again spread robot-kind throughout the galaxy. Some of the kids have other ideas, though, partially because humans are naturally rebellious and partially because they’re bad at anything. Any author who doesn’t factor in natural incompetence isn’t writing about actual humans.

There are definitely similarities with my other books. The Chosen Twelve features comedy that helps deliver a message, although the exact message is up to the interpretation of the reader. For the cynics out there, maybe the moral of the story is that the human race is screwed. But the optimists of the world will find something to latch onto, too. That’s a demographic I reach out to daily with my parenting jokes. No matter how bad things get, there’s always some glimmer of hope that can be drawn from a situation, especially if you’re willing to laugh at yourself. That’s the silver lining that gets me through the average day of child rearing. The worst disasters lead to the best tweets.

This also wasn’t my first journey into rather, ahem, unrealistic concepts. My first book was a parenting guide to the zombie apocalypse. The concerning part about that was the publishing industry classified it as non-fiction. Maybe Amazon knows something about zombies the rest of us don’t. My other books were similarly classified as real, even when I was talking about protecting kids from alien abduction and accidental time travel. Maybe the publishing industry is run by very open-minded actuaries. The chances of any mishap, no matter how unlikely, are always greater than zero.

But in a much more noticeable way, The Chosen Twelve is a total departure from anything I’ve written before. This is truly fiction from the ground up. I don’t have any personal experience with being raised by robots on a distant moon base after the rest of the human race goes extinct, so a little conjecture was in order. All of the characters— while inspired by my strange and often futile dealings with my fellow organics over the past thirty-six years—were created from whole cloth. It was a freeing experience to not have to wait for something to go wrong in my life as a jumping off point. I could simply invent a disaster and inflict it on fictional people. That was a huge relief for me. Not so much for my characters.

The Chosen Twelve was totally different than anything I’ve written before, but also comfortingly familiar. To experience both feelings, check it out at a bookstore or library near you. Stepping into the world of sci-fi has been a blast and I hope to stay here for a very long time. Or until the human race goes extinct and the final few kids are relegated to a distant moon base, whichever comes first.

The Chosen Twelve is out now in paperback, audiobook and ebook