Ray Nayler was born in Quebec and spoke French before he spoke English. The son of a hardware engineer, Nayler grew up in Fremont, California. “As a kid, I once had so many overdue books that one of the librarians showed up at my house to get them back. I grew up skateboarding, and still snowboard with my best friend, who I’ve known since the seventh grade, every year.” Nayler studied modern literature with a focus on genre fiction and film noir at UC Santa Cruz, and later earned his master’s in global diplomacy from the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at SOAS University of London. He lived in San Francisco at one point, working for a nonprofit that tore buildings apart to preserve the materials and keep them out of the waste stream, and before that did all kinds of work, from commercial driving to working in warehouses and factories and much more.

To say Ray Nayler has traveled would be an understatement: “When I was twenty-seven, I joined the Peace Corps, serving in Turkmenistan. I stayed overseas and worked in Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan. I joined the Foreign Service in 2010 and served in Vietnam, Kyrgyzstan (my second time living there), Azerbaijan, and Kosovo.”

Nayler had a few SFF genre fiction sales in the late 90s and early 2000s, including “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” in Cemetery Dance. Things really picked up for him in 2015, with “Mutability” in the June issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine. He continued to sell to Asimov’s, with fiction appearing every year in that venue, until finally branching out: his first (but certainly not last) appearance in Clarkesworld was the January 2019 issue, with story “Fire in the Bone.” Nayler quickly became a notable science fiction short story author, with work in several of the top venues of the field, stories reprinted in several year’s best anthologies, a number of appearances on the Asimov’s Readers Poll and the Locus Recommended Reading List, and a host of glowing responses from appreciative readers and industry reviewers. Novelette “Sarcophagus” from the April 2021 Clarkesworld was a Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award finalist. Nayler has also sold translations of Russian-language fiction to Clarkesworld and Samovar.

Nayler’s debut novel The Mountain in the Sea, published by MCD x FSG in 2022, was released to critical acclaim. It also received a Kitschies nomination, was shortlisted for an Arthur C. Clark Award, was a Nebula finalist, and won a Locus Award. Tordotcom novella The Tusks of Extinction (2024) was a Locus and Nebula finalist and won a Hugo Award. Cybernetic political thriller Where the Axe is Buried was published in 2025 by MCD, again to critical acclaim, multiple starred reviews, and landing a spot on the recent Locus Recommended Reading List.

Ray Nayler has lived nearly half his life outside the United States, “including a stint as Environment, Science, Technology, and Health Officer at the US consulate in Ho Chi Minh City.” He returned to the US, to Washington, DC, after nineteen years abroad. He was an international advisor to the Office of National Marine Sanctuaries at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and was most recently a visiting scholar at the George Washington University’s Institute for International Science and Technology Policy.

Nayler’s latest novel is the eagerly anticipated Palaces of the Crow, wherein “four young teens caught between Nazis and the Red Army survive winter in the woods with the help of a flock of highly intelligent crows with a magnificent secret of their own to protect.” Palaces of the Crow is due this month from MCD.

What, for you, is the role of speculative fiction (SFF and similar)? What does this approach to storytelling do that “realistic” fiction doesn’t or can’t; and how does this apply to Palaces of the Crow?

For me, SF is not something apart from “realistic” fiction. Successful SF will always include all of the elements found in any wider definition of fiction, but it also includes other techniques for telling stories about the world. The most notable of those techniques is what I call predication—imagining a “what if” scenario (or a novum, if you prefer Suvin’s terminology) and predicating a world based upon that alteration. Mary Shelley says it best in her preface to Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. “The event on which the interest of the story depends . . . was recommended by the novelty of the situations which it develops; and, however impossible as a physical fact, affords a point of view to the imagination for the delineating of human passions more comprehensive and commanding than any which the ordinary relations of existing events can yield.” I would say that’s a great definition for what SF allows us to do as writers. And it’s a great definition of what the crows in Palaces of the Crow allow me to do. They allow a point of view on events that is more comprehensive because it includes more than only the human point of view.

What drew you to write a story set during World War II, as well as a story set in Lithuania?

The two world wars are the twin, intertwined, defining events of our modern human history. We would not be who and where we are without them. Without them, technology would be far different from what it is today, but so would the entire way that the world is organized. It is not an overstatement to say that much of what shapes our modern world is a product of these wars. I do not think that without understanding these two entangled events it is possible to understand—politically, technologically, or culturally—our world as it is now.

While a lot of our stories in the United States are about the Western European part of World War Two and our own role (and about the Western European part of World War Two as a whole), most of the killing in the European theater of World War Two was done in the East. Nine out of every ten German casualties were inflicted by the Soviet Union. The Western campaigns were important, but mostly as a way of diverting German resources from where they were most needed. They were peripheral. The most central stories of World War Two are eastern stories, and my long history (nearly two decades) of living in republics within the former territory of the Soviet Union, in Russia itself, and in the Balkans, gives me a very different perspective on the shape of this conflict.

As for why Lithuania in particular: the central event of World War Two, the thing that sets it apart from any conflict before or after, was the extermination campaign led by the Nazis, their allies, and the populations that colluded with them. Lithuania, Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine were where much of that extermination campaign was carried out. Palaces of the Crow is about, among other things, the extermination campaigns in the east, viewed from the ground and from the air, and how some were able to survive those campaigns through mutual aid and profound self-sacrifice.

What was the initial inspiration for Palaces of the Crow, and how did those initial ideas and story transform over development, edits, and revisions?

Writing a novel is such an iterative process for me—a constant building through circling back, reinforcing, extending, laminating, and binding together ideas. It is hard for me to trace the origins of Palaces of the Crow all the way back to any sort of a beginning because the roots of the book probably extend all the way back to a presentation I gave in fifth grade about Operation Barbarossa. Or to the class I took on the literature of the holocaust at UCSC as an undergraduate, and the profound impact reading This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen had on me. Or to my years living in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, when every winter millions of crows would take over the city, shaking the trees with their arguments and conversations. Or to the crows in Kosovo, who used to fly over our house every evening, returning to the city from gleaning the fields, flying overhead in a mass you could only measure in time. Or to all of the stories I heard, in Central Asia and in Russia, of a very different World War Two than the one I grew up “knowing” in the easy, spurious way we know things until we are torn from our own context.

There are origin points to a novel, but they are so very faint at the beginning that I can’t quite make out which ones are most significant. And then once the process gets started, the book gains a life of its own, a reality and a texture and an identity, and at every point along the way it seems as if whatever the book is about is what it was always about after all. That’s part of the great process of discovery that is writing. The book builds and builds on itself, and although it started somewhere in the past, it becomes very difficult to identify any single origin point.

What kind of research went into this book, and what were some of the things you found that were most interesting to you, whether or not they ended up in the final copy?

I love research. Writing, for me, is an excuse to be curious about the world: it is a craft of curiosity at its very heart, and one of the great joys about writing is the way it gives me something to do with my curiosity. I love to learn, and Palaces of the Crow offered me plenty of opportunities to learn. It involved reading hundreds of books and articles on everything from corvid intelligence to partisan warfare to forest ecology to Roma traditions to the history of the Pale of Settlement and Vilnius’ Litvak Jewish population. As is usual, 99 percent of that research is invisible in the final draft, but that invisibility is not the same as saying it “does not show up” in the book. It means that it is everywhere integrated into the book, with the goal of creating a complete world. I usually feel as if I have done enough research when I can “see” the world I am writing about at the level of granularity necessary. I definitely reached that point here: at one point, I was down on my hands and knees in a Lithuanian forest meadow, photographing, identifying, and documenting every species of wildflower, tree, and herb. I’m thorough, to say the least.

The Publishers Weekly review describes this book as “an impassioned paean to togetherness even in the midst of the chaotic isolation of war and to the power of storytelling to keep memory and hope alive.” For readers who know your short fiction and perhaps even your longer work, what are the things about this book that may surprise them, as well as the things that will feel very familiar?

I like what my agent, Seth Fishman, said about it after he read it. He said that, although it seems so different from anything I have written before, he can clearly see the lines of engagement that bind it together with my other books and with my stories. I loved that. I never want to write the same book twice. I never want to rest on a single theme, and I never want my readers to be able to “expect” a certain kind of book from me. I always want to surprise them and find new ways for us to keep our conversation going. But at the same time, I want them to see that there are linkages between the works, thematic concerns, and philosophical concerns that bind my work together. Palaces of the Crow takes up concerns that The Mountain in the Sea had and concerns that The Tusks of Extinction had and concerns that Where the Axe is Buried had. It deals with them in new and different ways and weaves a new pattern of them and adds new concerns in, but sympathetic and aware readers will see clear connections.

Palaces of the Crow is your third published full-length novel. What did you learn from your experiences with your previous novels, and perhaps also your novellas, that you brought to this project?

I am constantly learning. My mantra as a writer is this: making makes the maker. I write to improve my writing and to improve my thinking and to hone and improve my way of observing and of being in the world. Writing is self-work, and so all of the lessons I learned in writing are present, from the moment I began writing as a kid to this moment. The lessons I learned in writing all of my short stories, and in writing Mountain and Tusks and Axe, are here in Palaces, and the lessons I learned in writing Palaces are in the next book (already written, due out in 2027) and in the book I am writing now (the world will see that one in 2028).

What, for you, is at the heart of Palaces of the Crow; what is this book truly about?

This is a book about mutual aid. It is a book about putting the other before the self. It is a book about the preservation of the other within the self. I woke up from a dream, and I wrote in my journal: the self is that portion of the other which the self accepts as constituting the self. I don’t think I have ever written a truer thing. That is the core of Palaces of the Crow.

What is important to know about the central characters, Neriya, Czesław, Kezia, and Innokentiy? What is most interesting about each, as well as about their dynamic?

I’d like the book to introduce the characters. It does it best. But I’ll say this: every book is in dialogue with other books, and in some ways this book is my response to William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.

What else are you working on, what’s coming up that you’d like folks to know about?

I’m superstitious about talking too much about projects I am currently working on, but I am pleased to let readers know that I will have a short story collection out, my first collection in English, following Palaces of the Crow. The collection’s title will be Mender of Sparrows. Its exact release date is still being scheduled, but I think you’ll see it in early 2027 or so.