Kate Mildenhall on connecting women's stories across time in 'The Hummingbird Effect'

Good Reading Podcast

One of the lucky few with a job during the Depression, Peggy’s just starting out in life. She’s a bagging girl at the Angliss meatworks, a place buzzing with life as well as death, where the gun slaughterman Jack has caught her eye – and she his. How is her life connected to Hilda’s, almost a hundred years later, locked inside during a plague, or La’s, further on again, a singer working shifts in a warehouse as her eggs are frozen and her voice is used by AI bots? Let alone Maz, far removed in time, diving for remnants of a past that must be destroyed? Is it by the river that runs through their stories, eternal yet constantly changing – or by the mysterious Hummingbird Project, and the great question of whether the march of progress can ever be reversed? In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Kate Mildenhall about bringing historical fiction and speculative fiction together to create great stories, how playing with AI and ChatGPT led to insights into what ChatGPT can do, and how working with different literary elements led her to the creation of new structures.