By Nithya Ramcharan

From extraplanetary cities to dreamy shoujo-anime-inspired love interests, Wendy Xu’s new graphic novel The Infinity Particle (out August 29, 2023) has it all. Having previously authored the award-winning fantasy graphic novels Tidesong and Mooncakes, Xu made the switch to science fiction with The Infinity Particle.

Xu has loved graphic novels since childhood, which included manga and Chinese comics such as The Adventures of Sanmao the Waif. She started to draw comics almost as long ago. Most of her influences include manga artists such as Maison Ikkoku’s Rumiko Takahashi, Mars’ Fuyumi Soryo, and Clamp, a group of four female manga artists. She was not as exposed to American comics until college, when she interned for Marvel. However, manga remained pivotal to her journey as an artist.

“Representation was never really [an issue] for me,” Xu said. “I saw how many Japanese women were making comics. I never really felt like I could not make comics.”

Before she began writing graphic novels, Xu held day jobs in library curation, publication, and a law firm. She wanted to find a job that allowed her to pursue art on the side but found difficulty doing so. In the meantime, she maintained an art blog.

“I’ve grown up around visual storytelling my whole life,” Xu said. “I didn’t really think to make a career out of it until some of my art blogs gained traction.”

In 2016, after finding her current agent, she pitched Mooncakes, which had started as a web comic, and commenced her publication journey. The Infinity Particle is her first solo YA novel. In her foray into science fiction, Xu depicts a love story set in Mars between Clem Chang, a young engineer, and Kye, a sentient robot.

Xu was deliberate with her artistic choices. The palette of the extraterrestrial setting, consisting of muted shades of pink and orange, was color-picked from images taken by a rover on Mars. Xu also wanted to convey emotion depending on the intensity of the color. Her art featured biological design, wherein manmade structures are built from materials sourced directly from naturally-occurring elements.

“A lot of the buildings in The Infintiy Particle are soft,” said Xu. “I looked at videos of people building their own homes with sustainable materials and they were using hay bales for wall insulation… They were making a mud house. People have made mud houses for thousands of years. I wanted to go to the future by going to the past. That’s why a lot of the buildings [in the novel] are modern but also rounded-looking.”

The protagonist Clem was designed in homage to a character Xu drew as a teenager. She gave Clem a “low-maintenance” look which aligned with her career as a roboticist. Xu wanted Kye to look different from conventional male love interests, giving him a more feminine-presenting look with long hair and C-Drama inspired outfits (and a Blade Runner’s Roy Batty-inspired trench coat). As she designed characters and motifs, she maintained familiarity while introducing futuristic elements. For instance, much of the furniture has East Asian influences. In addition, Xu’s favorite scene to write involved Clem and Kye bonding over cup noodles, now wrapped in environmentally sustainable packaging. Her technologically-advanced companion is a small moth-like AI.

“Humans love little guys,” Xu said. “We love cute things. I kept this in mind: what have human beings always loved, what have we always recognized that we don’t need to reinvent?…I want to think that we’d keep things such as cup noodles. That’s just my little fantasy.”

To remain somewhat grounded in reality, Xu ensured that Clem and Kye’s world was influenced by real historical events and conducted extensive research in various topics ranging from the tech industry to physics.

“I did a lot of research into contemporary Silicon Valley and what the tech industry is like this century,” Xu said. “Even though this book is set hundreds of years in the future, I feel like it’s really important to have a historical basis.”

By incorporating fictional events into the novel’s timeline as an era of Techno-Feudalism, Xu wanted to make clear she did not intend to glamorize the current tech-dominated world in any capacity.

“I think about how many of these big companies have campuses that are isolated from the rest of society,” Xu said. “There are campus-exclusive restaurants, and barbershops, and stores—and how is that different from a company town, as in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower?…I think techno-feudalism is a good way to describe how beholden a lot of people are to the gig economy that pays them so little.”

Along with the historical context, Xu wanted existentialism, conveyed through Kye, to be a key component of the novel.

“All robot stories at their heart are stories about what it means to be human and have feeling. A lot of robot stories are very philosophical, from Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep to Blade Runner, which is based on [the former],” said Xu. “I think one of my favorite movies as a teenager was Spielberg’s AI, which is a retelling of a fairytale, actually—it’s a retelling of Pinocchio. I’d never seen that before: taking a fairytale but making it sci-fi while incorporating these fairytale motifs.”

With this framework, there were a few revisions of The Infinity Particle. Xu mentioned that it was initially a story of memory loss, reminiscent of The Snow Queen, and Kye was once upon a time human. But as Xu’s research progressed, she considered the reasons behind creating robots, their functions in assisting humanity, and how Clem would disrupt that status quo with Kye. As she fleshed out the romance, Xu said she thought about the commonalities she would introduce between the two characters and developing a concrete reason for an AI falling in love with a human.

“There needed to be something between them that they can’t get with other people,” said Xu.

Aside from the close interactions between artificial and human intelligence, relationships among women are prominently featured, particularly the growing awkwardness between Clem and Dr. Lin, her brilliant but capricious mentor who also built Kye.

Xu said she is most proud of the work she has done for The Infinity Particle. She talked about the effort she put into the novel and wanted people to recognize the setting and systems of the world portrayed beyond Clem and Kye’s journey. 

“I did a lot of research,” she said. “It wasn’t just about the story—it’s a statement I want to make about the future and how we can still have a nice future. I feel like it’s very hard to be optimistic about the future right now, and I’m not trying to be soothing necessarily, but I’m trying to make people—young people especially—think about the ways in which they can have [a good future].”

When asked about advice she would like to provide emerging artists, especially visual artists, she replied, “Keep a messy sketch book that you don’t show anybody and have it be physical paper and pencil or pen. When we draw digitally, it’s very easy to get caught up in how easily you can erase things. A lot of the liveliness of the line in a finished piece is practiced when you are drawing without the expectation that you can go and erase because you have to let it be, and let things be imperfect.”

Xu is currently working on a fantasy graphic YA novel, and that is all she can say about it right now.

For those who enjoyed The Infinity Particle, Xu recommends the following fiction: Defy the Stars by Claudia Gray and Machinehood by S.B Divya. For graphic novels and web comics: Fuyumi Soryo’s Mars, Toranosuke Shimada’s Robo Sapiens, and Blue Delliquanti’s O Human Star. For nonfiction: Carlo Rovelli’s Helgoland, Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life, and Max Fisher’s The Chaos Machine.

“One of my main tips [for becoming a writer] is to read nonfiction,” Xu said. “If you read 20 books, and they’re all fiction, and they’re all telling a story a certain way, you’re going to trap yourself into telling a story that kind of way, but if you read nonfiction and read widely, you’re going to find lots of different ways to tell stories.”

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Wendy Xu is a bestselling, award-nominated Brooklyn-based illustrator and comics artist.

She is the creator of the middle grade fantasy graphic novel Tidesong (2021 from HarperCollins/Quilltree) and co-creator of Mooncakes, a young adult fantasy graphic novel published in 2019 from Oni Press. Her work has been featured on Catapult, Barnes & Noble Sci-fi/Fantasy Blog, and Tor.com, among other places.

She is currently working on an upcoming graphic novel from Harper Collins. You can find more art on her instagram: @artofwendyxu, on twitter: @angrygirLcomics, or cohost: @wendyxu.

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Nithya Ramcharan is a WNDB blog volunteer from New Orleans. She loves writing and reading. When she isn’t busy with academics, she also loves art, music, playing with her dogs, and dreaming of all the places she would love to visit.