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Why? It’s a simple question. Some might say a childish one. Indeed, “Why?” is often the first question a person learns in life. And yet it also remains the most profound and unanswerable of all questions. Armed with only these three letters, any child can reduce even the most learned to a state of embarrassing, spluttering cluelessness within the span of a few repetitions. In time, most of us learn either to live without answers or to cling to reassuring articles of faith. But what happens when those aren’t options? What happens when one cannot believe but also cannot let go of the burning, all-consuming need to know “why, why, why?” To what lengths might such a person go?

In his new sci-fi thriller, For Emma (2025), author Ewan Morrison paints a harrowing, deeply chilling portrait of a daughter who tried to build a god to answer the “Big Why”, and a father’s chaotic unraveling as he too seeks for answers — about her covered-up death. I sat down with Morrison to discuss his novel, modern society, nihilism, the crisis of meaning, violence seeking an answer, hate speech, and more.

For Emma is Morrison’s ninth published book — and his first work of science fiction. The Scottish novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and sometime director has used just about every medium at his disposal to probe the tensions between individual identity, culture, and belief systems, often revolving around modern family/relationship dynamics and sexuality.

“My first few books were queer as hell,” Morrison, who’s bi himself, told me with a chuckle. The Last Book You Read and Other Stories (2005), Swung (2007), Distance (2008), and Ménage (2009) explore things like swinging, long-distance sexual intimacy, bisexual throuples, and “every kind of sexuality under the sun.” In recent years, however, his work has shifted from the personal to the political, delving more into the trends, forces, and ideas shaping — and deranging — modern life. And For Emma takes a number of society’s most pressing and timely challenges to their most horrifying logical conclusions.

Emma Henson is an extraordinarily gifted young American scientist who mysteriously dies in an AI-brain interface experiment gone wrong. Tormented by grief, her father, Josh Cartwright, demands answers, explanations, and closure — but everything about Emma’s death, and everyone involved, is quietly suppressed, disappeared, or worse. Cleverly told as a series of illicit, in-world video diaries collected and periodically annotated by a journalist identified only as the “Editor”, For Emma documents Cartwright’s psychologically unhinged last 30 days before he commits an act of explosive domestic terrorism to avenge his daughter’s death and murder the Biosys tech CEO responsible. But this machine rages back.

“I wanted the book to be painfully personal,” Morrison told me. “I can't really do that with the third person. The only way to do that is to have an overheard or recorded first-person account. And the idea came to me of a person talking to someone who isn't there, someone who's dead. I wanted to capture this raw emotionality of that, but I didn’t want Josh to be talking straight to us in an unfiltered way. So the idea of the Editor came out of that — the idea of these being found or banned or censored recordings, documentary footage of a man talking, a man who's responsible for a bombing, which we know about at the start.”

As an exploration of the mind’s descent through grief and into madness, Cartwright reminded me of Stephen King’s Jack Torrance from The Shining (1977) and Louis Creed from Pet Sematary (1983). As a tale of a lone man standing against the might of near-omniscient techno-oligarchs, he also put me in mind of the Tom Cruise version of Philip K. Dick’s John Anderton from Minority Report (2002). Morrison’s inspirations were altogether more high-minded, varied, and current.

“I've always wanted to have a Dostoevskian character,” Morrison told me. “Someone who's willing to go beyond morality and take things too far, like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. I’ve also always been interested in the outsider genre, you know, the little nobody against the world, like in the books of Camus and Michel Houellebecq. I guess the real-life story of the Unabomber as well.

“I also found myself increasingly in that [mindset] during COVID. My wife has a [medical condition] and was on the list of people who were supposed to be kept away from everything. And for my ‘sins’ as someone who believed the virus came from a lab in Wuhan, I was an ‘evil conspiracy theorist’ — one who turned out not to be a conspiracy theorist after all. So I thought, what if my wife is killed by a scientific experiment gone wrong in a lab in a different country? [In the novel,] Josh is someone who loses a daughter to a scientific experiment and finds that the industries of science, AI, and government double down on silencing him and everyone involved. So I guess the book really emerged from the awareness that what we were told about COVID was not true, and I thought, ‘What if people I know are injured or die, and we never get to the truth of this at all?’ I would be so angry, and you know those flashes of vengeful rage, that’s gold for a novelist.”

The story provides a frightening glimpse into an all-too-plausible future, one where privacy no longer exists, where corporations have more power than governments, and where those who control technology can operate with total impunity. For Emma shows us a near future in which free expression has completely eroded as a cultural and political norm, where the ruling techno-bureaucracies weaponize social justice and safety language to spin their authoritarianism. To dissent is deemed “hate speech”, an issue very personal for Morrison.

“Hate speech has become a huge issue in the UK. We're going through a real clamp down,” Morrison said, referring to the fallout from the UK’s far-right riots in 2024. “We have to be able to be allowed to offend other people. It's not a human right to be protected from offense. I think this is part of the problem progressivism has had after the death of the old left. What are the new goals of progressivism? Behavioral control. The old left failed at the planned economy, but what the new left can do is create the myth that we can have a completely planned society, which would involve planned language and planned behavior. And there's all the technologies that are assisting that.

“And on the other side, you've got the TERFs, the identity skeptics, and the ‘anti-woke’ people calling for more government powers as well — more government powers to police toilets and to clamp down on the anti-free speech activists themselves. Both sides are calling for more state power. It just strikes me that if you were a government, you couldn't cook up a form of protest that would [expand your power more] than to have both sides arguing for the same solution.”

That’s the problem with “hate speech” as a concept, of course. It’s so open-ended and subjective that it gives authorities all the cover they need to use it as a cudgel, a dynamic I covered several years ago when Brazil ruled that homophobic hate speech could be punished by imprisonment. But in the near future of For Emma, technocrats haven’t just killed free expression, they’ve also scrubbed every trace of humanity out of the medical system, to be replaced by a matrix of Byzantine bureaucracy reminiscent of a rather different Brazil — Terry Gilliam’s 1985 film. There’s a kind of dark comedy to the ways in which Cartwright is systematically stonewalled and thwarted by a succession of clipboard-wielding functionaries, automated phone systems, and maddeningly chipper grief-counseling cartoon characters.

“I’ve had quite a bit of experience dealing with the awful bureaucracies of death and suffering,” Morrison said. “There's this move to displace your authentic experience towards some kind of bureaucratic solution. It’s these mental health apps or AIs that will help you through your most horrific experiences and the sort of humiliating chirpiness of them.”

Through Cartwright’s diary entries, split mostly between the logistics of bomb-making and planning his attacks and reminiscences of his daughter and the previous few years, we learn as much about Em (as Cartwright calls her) as we do Josh himself. Plagued from an early age with genius-level intelligence, her father’s depressive tendencies, and an almost pathological fixation with questioning everything and needing to know “why”, we relive Em’s poignant origin story through Josh’s eyes. She has such incredible brilliance and this endearingly unique and quirky personality. But at the same time, she’s also straight out of central casting for “young progressive woman” — she’s rainbow-haired, bisexual, and into social justice. And she’s desperate to find something of significance.

“We are in a meaning crisis”, Morrison said. “And Em’s attempt to find the answer to the ‘Big Why’ is what leads her to big tech, and tragically puts her in the arms of another kind of totalizing, transcendent belief system.”

In Emma’s case, this belief system is a sort of Bay Area-style transhumanist faith that artificial intelligence can be, if not a god, then at least a messianic prophet. This incongruence between her individuality and her willingness to subordinate herself to technology conveys a truth so visible in today’s culture: no matter how intelligent you are, anyone can fall down a rabbit hole or be swallowed by the machine — in this case, literally.

“I think Em is part of that tradition that you get with David Foster Wallace of the impotent person who knows too much about too many things but can't tie them to anything substantial in daily life,” Morrison said. “So she's tying it to the creation of a super intelligence that will answer all of our questions.

“I know that when I'm in the depths of depression, the ‘why’ question is the stumbling block for everything. So I was interested in how a child's game of ‘why?’ could turn into something that could completely floor an adult or a father who hasn't got the answers. Why get out of bed? Why work? These little innocent questions become huge mountains to climb for the seriously depressed person.”

Josh personifies something similar in that he doesn’t really believe in anything — but not for lack of trying. Time and again, he grasps for something to believe, to make sense of the world, to provide comfort, or solace, or purpose, but he simply cannot find anything believable enough to accept.

“He’s stuck with Kierkegaard's crisis, which is that the only belief you can have is an irrational one and you can only take a leap of faith,” Morrison told me. “And in a sense, he finds meaning and purpose in those 30 days when he's preparing for the act of murder-suicide. It’s really the only time in his life or his adult life that he has grasped something with incredible immediacy. All of the pieces start to make sense. He starts decoding his past. He starts feeling more present and more generous as he's about to do something horrific and atrocious. The path of the nihilist clutching at straws and clutching at meaning can lead towards acts of violence seeking an answer. Something to tie everything together, finally.”

In many ways, the book is a critique of postmodernity and the hollow disconnectedness of modern life. In one particularly cutting soliloquy, Cartwright opens up about the struggle to raise a child and keep his marriage together in the absence of any real values:

“In truth Em, like every other middle-class parent in our set in San Fran, we were busking it without any values at all. A righteous passion for recycling plastics was perhaps all we amounted to. If someone asked us ‘do you believe in marriage,’ we’d have said no. ‘The family?’ No. ‘Community?’ No. ‘This great nation?’ No fucking way. And as for progress and equality, they’d all turned to garbage in the streets. Your mother and I believed in nothing at all. We didn’t believe in our jobs; your mom loathed PR but her PR company was rated twelfth in the region; and I loathed television but spent all day editing infomercials and if I got lucky a tacky documentary once a year. And how can you really raise a child if you see yourself as a sell-out, you hate your society and you see marriage as an oppressive institution? We didn’t have an answer to your Big Why, Em, and since we didn’t even believe in each other, the next question came: Why stay together? For the sake of the child?”

“I wanted to write about the trouble of my generation trying to be parents, Generation X,” Morrison said. “We were playfully raised as nihilists. All of our culture was just pushing the edges of that, whether it was Linkin Park or Slipknot or Nine Inch Nails, and all the books we were reading, like JT Leroy or Irvin Welsh. Nihilism was in its rebellious phase at that point.”

The problem is, without answers to the big questions, without belief systems, without anything resembling a cogent life philosophy, “Invariably, what nihilist parents do is just rely on the state,” as Morrison told me.

But the layers of doubt infused in For Emma go beyond the character’s existential angst or mental breakdowns — we, the reader, are in doubt. Given that everything we’re shown comes filtered through archival material and redacted documents, with a primary narrator whose intense psychosis and hallucinations render him decidedly unreliable, we’re never quite sure what is real and what isn’t. Is Cartwright somehow in communication with Em’s consciousness? Is he part of the experiment himself? Is everything just in his head? Morrison wisely skirted these questions, letting the reader decide.

“I let myself be seduced by [several possibilities],” Morrison said with a smirk, “Being a bit of a whore, I thought, ‘damn I'm gonna have it both ways!’ But it is a study of a man with mental illness.”

For Em is billed as a sci-fi thriller, but it’s just as much a work of deeply philosophical horror. It’s everything that haunts the psyche: totalitarianism, the death of one’s children, the erasure of reality, the loss of one’s own mind, and that nightmarish sense of a futile flight away from or in pursuit of implacable forces that can neither be caught nor evaded. At the same, it’s also one man’s emotionally crushing struggle to let go of his perished daughter. Perhaps the most terrifying aspect of all is how we see in the doomed figure of Cartwright an eerie glimmer of ourselves. Sanity is a precarious thing. Much as we would like to deny it, we are all several unfortunate nudges away from hearing voices and building bombs in our soiled underwear. There but for the grace of Biosys go we.

Published Apr 3, 2025