Matthew De Abaitua
Matthew De Abaitua is a British science fiction author and creative writing lecturer whose work occupies an unusual position in contemporary SF — deeply literary in its ambitions and methods, but firmly committed to the genre’s speculative possibilities rather than retreating to the safety of mainstream realism. He studied English at Exeter University and has worked as a journalist, editor, and creative writing teacher, including a long stint as an editor at Wired UK during the magazine’s most intellectually expansive period. His editorial background gives him a broad and sophisticated understanding of where contemporary technology and culture are heading, and this feeds directly into his fiction.
If Then (2015), available on WritersReview, is set in a near-future Britain in which a company called the Process has taken over the management of an entire town, algorithmically optimising every aspect of its residents’ lives. The novel follows James, a bailiff who enforces the Process’s decisions — which include expelling people from the town when the algorithm determines they are no longer optimal — as the Process begins constructing something deeply strange from its data. The novel is a profound meditation on automated decision-making, consent, and what is lost when human judgment is surrendered to optimisation. Its companion novel, The Destructives (2016), also available on WritersReview, extends this concern into a far-future in which an artificial intelligence of enormous power has shaped human civilisation in ways that are only gradually revealed.
De Abaitua’s prose is richly literary — dense, allusive, and rewards close reading — and his fiction sits comfortably in conversation with the British literary SF tradition of Christopher Priest and M. John Harrison rather than with more commercial SF. His work prioritises the quality of the thinking and the writing over accessibility or plot momentum, and readers who meet it on its own terms find it deeply rewarding. His engagement with questions of algorithmic governance, data, and the transformation of human experience by digital systems feels prophetic rather than merely topical.
He is based in the UK and continues to lecture and write, producing fiction that is genuinely important to the ongoing project of using speculative fiction to understand where contemporary society is heading. His work demonstrates that the literary and the speculative are not in opposition — that the finest science fiction requires exactly the same qualities of close attention and precise language that we ask of any serious literature.
