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Seven Machina Rasmussen was created in a lab from the remnants of a crashed UFO in an audacious attempt to create the world's gayest computer. Government officials claimed under duress that she is an astrobiologist, author, and science communicator. Rasmussen also writes science fiction under the pen name C.M. Fields, with recent works appearing in Clarkesworld, Diabolical Plots, and Neon Hemlock. She haunts the Internet as @toomanyspectra, and blurry images of her corporeal form occasionally manifest in Brooklyn. Her debut nonfiction is Cloudy with a Chance of Starships: How the Drake Equation Reveals the Odds of Life in the Cosmos (Princeton University Press, August 4, 2026).
Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:
Are we alone in the universe? Princeton University Press asked astronomy's gayest and most terminally online autist to find out.
On your nightstand now:
Books that live on my nightstand, in my bed, and wedged between the box frame and the wall. Which ones am I actually actively reading? I'll never tell.
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
A Larger Reality, collection of essays and poetry by Ursula K. Le Guin and commentary from scholars
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector (translated by Katrina Dodson)
Entangled States by Karmela Padavic-Callaghan
The Secret Lives of Color by Kassia St. Clair
The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
Make Me Better by Sarah Gailey
Work to Do by Jules Wernersbach
Favorite book when you were a child:
The Chronicles of Narnia! I would read all seven books back-to-back over and over again. I still have the omnibus, which has a million water stains because I would read it in the bathtub. I was just so completely pulled into the storytelling. In my fiction, I'm always trying to re-create that complete absorption that captivated me as a child. And when I was very little, I loved Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland so much that I had the entire book memorized. My mom would take me and my book to parties and amaze people with her toddler who could read.
Your top five authors:
N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy and short story collection, How Long 'Til Black Future Month, I consider to be some of the best science fiction of the decade. Dan Simmons wrote my favorite sci-fi series, the Hyperion Cantos. That's my gold standard of world-building. Jeff VanderMeer (the Southern Reach series) writes the weirdest, most brain-melting prose I've ever had the pleasure of reading. Ursula K. Le Guin (The Left Hand of Darkness) is the intellectual equivalent of staring at the sun (incomparably brilliant). Tamsyn Muir's Locked Tomb series taught the power of committing to an absolutely insane premise so hard that it permanently alters the brain chemistry of gay people around the world.
Book you've faked reading:
This is really terrible of me, but I've never read Contact by Carl Sagan. I've never even seen the movie. I have read several books by Sagan, I've met Jill Tarter (on whom the book is based), and I like to think I'm in the top 100 people the government would abduct to Area 51 to attempt first contact, but I have not read Contact. This is my cross to bear.
Book you're an evangelist for:
I am the #1 fan of the Soviet dystopian novel We by Yevgeny Zamyatin. We may have inspired both Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's 1984. It was the first book the Soviet Union banned as an act of censorship, so in 1924 it was smuggled to the United States and published there. It was only unbanned in the Soviet Union in 1988. I have TWO tattoos about We: one is of the antihero, I-330, and the other is the words NO FINAL REVOLUTION from my elbow to my wrist.
Book you've bought for the cover:
A novella called The Lies of the Ajungo by Moses Ose Utomi. I saw a signed copy at Wondercon 2024 and the cover absolutely blew me away. It's a great read too!
Book you hid from your parents:
I'm not sure how this happened but when I was 11, my grandmother passed away and I inherited her Nora Roberts collection. So before I ever took what passed for sex ed in my hometown I was reading '90s/'00s bodice rippers like The Calhoun Women series and Carolina Moon. This probably had no effect on my psychosexual development or romantic expectations.
Book that changed your life:
Okay, this is genuinely a crazy story. In high school I wanted to be a band director, but an internship at a local elementary school convinced me that I was not cut out to teach public school. So around graduation I quit my music major and had absolutely not the slightest clue what to do with my life anymore. But one day my parents went to the Sears at the mall for car tires and left me to wander around by myself. I walked into the Borders and saw a book on the front table called The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow. I cannot tell you why I, a C student, decided to pick up a book about astrophysics. But I did. And you know what. It was written so accessibly that it convinced me in one afternoon that I could be an astrophysicist. And the rest is history.
Favorite line from a book:
In my humble opinion, the single greatest line ever penned is this one by Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: "The ships hung in the air in much the same way that bricks don't." Brilliant. The pinnacle of literature. Imagine having the audacity to craft such a bold simile. This sentence alone makes Adams one of the greatest science fiction authors of all time.
Five books you'll never part with:
Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer (signed in 2018)
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (my high school copy)
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
An Introduction to Modern Astrophysics by Bradley W. Carroll and Dale A. Ostlie
Steering the Craft by Ursula K. Le Guin
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson. Absolute banger. Insert 100 fire emojis here. It's got festering lifelong thirst for revenge. It's got lesbians. It's got the most elaborate fantasy economics system I've ever read in my life. The prose alone makes me shake my fist at the heavens and rend my clothes. Every time I think about Dickinson's descriptions of scenery I want to chew on batteries. Seth if you are reading this, please take all the time you need to perfect Book Four. Also please come to my biweekly art salon here in Bushwick.
Your favorite bookstore:
Great question. The answer is Hive Mind Books here in Brooklyn. Hive Mind is a queer independent bookstore where I spend 90% of my productive hours. It is staffed by the nicest people in the universe. It is sunny and full of plants and always smells like espresso and fresh paper. The sticker collection is unparalleled. Plus they adopted my Labubu when he fell off my bag. Shout-out to barista, bookseller, and queer icon Rain, who (ironically?) is god's brightest ray of sunshine.