TALKING POINTS

THEMES & CHARACTERS

  • How science fiction has evolved since the turn of the 21st century—from Y2K anxieties, to post-9/11 spiritual reckoning, to today’s fears around AI and genetic technology— and how the evolution of Ascendants mirrors this cultural moment
  • Set in 2060, Ascendants imagines a world divided by genetic destiny: Ascendants, who are biologically destined for an afterlife, and Biomasses, who face permanent oblivion.
  • Ascendants uses genetic determinism as a contemporary faith system; a religion built into DNA where salvation and damnation are biological facts. 
  • Ascendants asks: when science replaces God as the arbiter of eternal life, what happens to choice, and the human need to believe in something beyond ourselves.
  • At its core, Ascendants sits on a fundamental idea: “It’s not the life you lead; it’s the blood you bleed.”
  • The novel follows 3 interwoven characters—a visionary scientist, a grieving believer, and a fierce young woman reckoning with what society has become—each forced to confront what belief truly costs.
  • How the story began with a single devastating scene between two characters and evolved over more than 2 decades—from feature screenplay, to short film anthology, to novel—mirroring the cultural shifts of the post-9/11 world and wrestling with questions about belief, technology, and what it means to be humans. 


SCI-FI AND AI 

  • Ascendants emerges at a uniquely prescient moment, examining humanity’s transformation under extreme technological acceleration at the same time AI is fundamentally reshaping society. 
  • Now, as AI threatens to blur the line between human and machine creation, contemporary sci-fi confronts questions of authenticity, consciousness, and whether technology elevates or erases humanity. Ascendants sit at this intersection, examining both the promise and peril of a world where technology doesn’t just change how we live, but who gets to exist at all.
  • Influenced from working on Barry Ptolemy’s Transcendent Man (a film about Ray Kurzweil), and lifelong passion for science fiction, Schechter explores belief, loss, identity, and the cost of extreme ideologies in Ascendants
  • Ascendants centers Jewish representation in science fiction, weaving personal history—including a death mirroring the author’s great-great-grandfather’s murder by Nazis—into a speculative future grounded in cultural memory. Why it’s important that speculative futures remain grounded in historical trauma.
  • How fear drives much of science fiction including this novel, and how the genre’s relationship with technology shifted from optimism and possibility to caution and warning.