Kyle E. Miller's The Idiot’s Garden thrusts you immediately into the reality that Bike, Peloria, Seed, and Nameless inhabit. In this futuristic, climate-fiction (cli-fi) novel, the oceans have boiled, whales consume power lines, and the people and creatures possess abilities beyond our present-day human world.

The Idiot’s Garden is not one thing: It's a postapocalyptic novel, poetry, and short stories. The exact category may not be the important thing, though. The language will draw you in with the riddle-like turns of phrases. “It was terrifying to be born a thing that could change its mind,” concludes the first unnamed chapter.

The characters come together by necessity. Events happen that this group does not fully understand, yet they keep finding ways forward. At the beginning of the book, Seed’s recovery from his all-consuming illness seems miraculous and is explained by the six-fingered Peloria having fed him a fish:

One look, and Bike knew something had changed. It was the difference between a bed of scorched gravel and a flowerbed, every detail replaced and rematched: the micrography of the boy’s body had been permanently altered, to what end he couldn’t guess.

“I told you not to get out of bed,” Bike said.

“I disobeyed.”

“Good boy.”

This change also marks Seed's evolution to Sefed. The crew watches each other’s backs and lets each other grow as well, until something unavoidable comes up that they must address.  

The puzzles and fables that pepper the text hold meaning. One feels especially alarming to Bike. “What did you yell a little bit ago?” Bike asks Sefed. Sefed responds, “Oh. Well. Was it ‘the plants walked out at night’?” It was not, and Sefed tries again: “I think I said, ‘The devil is a planet of the night.’ Is that right?” Bike confirms that it was, but downplays the significance. However, this riddle sets Bike—and ultimately all of them—on a journey, one that involves rescues, death, backstories, and their attempts to restrain something dangerous.  

Throughout it all, Peloria observes her surroundings. “To meet the requirements of the future, the cells listened to the directive of a level beyond the hardening of consciousness, which offered them one of several commands: persist with what was already known, experiment in the hopes of discovery, or preserve only what functioned and reinvent the rest.” This insight could be applied to the characters and their world, and which method the characters choose is tested on their quest.

Miller is based in Ypsilanti and read from his book at Wyrd Byrd on October 19. I caught up with him afterward for our following interview.

Q: Tell us about the world in The Idiot’s Garden. When is it? What is unique about this world?
A: The Idiot’s Garden takes place after calamity. Few humans exist, but the world is flourishing. It’s jumping with life (and unlife). I wanted to write a cli-fi novel that is, in some way, utopian. If some readers find it dangerously optimistic, all the better. The nature of the calamity is indistinct, but alluded to. A final human war is described in the book, and there are obvious nods to climate disaster, as well as hints of something potentially deeper, more sinister. Was it a series of disasters? An anthropogenic apocalypse? Regardless, it was a while ago, and life is progressing. If there were a fire, then the forest is nearly at its climax again.

When is it exactly? There are hints in the novel; there’s a date mentioned, several centuries in the future. So it’s at least that far, and probably much farther.

Q: The word choice in The Idiot’s Garden contributes to the feeling that it is a different world. As a reader, the language feels unexpected, and I slowed down to absorb it—the scene at the pond when “The moment was ripe for exploding.” Or Peloria’s speech, such as one of her statements, “Exploit space. Filter time.” How did you approach the narrator and diction?
A: When I first started writing, I couldn’t find a model for the style I wanted: baroque and intricate—illuminated—but not overwritten or garish. So the style was homegrown, so to speak, really a process of revision. It took several rewrites to achieve the texture I wanted. I think the first draft was probably overwritten and garish. It was a long process of refinement. I wanted it to feel alien, but also familiar. Writing about the far future is always tricky because if a book was really serious about being set thousands of years in the future, readers likely wouldn’t be able to make much sense of it. So I wanted to achieve that effect without a bunch of hokey neologisms or direct worldbuilding. I am very much inspired by the Dying Earth stories of Jack Vance and Gene Wolfe, so The Idiot’s Garden is science fiction written as if it were fantasy. I think that’s part of what makes it seem alien.

Q: Let’s talk about the characters. For Peloria, “Words made her small and distant; thoughts made her warm and globalized, distributed across a net of critical points, but humans were the opposite, or seemed to be, made smaller in thought and enlarged when sharing the components of language. She tried not to hate them for it—and why let them burden her senses, why think about them at all?” How do Peloria’s senses serve her?
A: Peloria lives primarily “in the moment,” as we say. Whether that’s an essential quality of her being or a trivial one, the reader can decide, but she seems to have been born/created with superhuman senses. Maybe her sensitivity leads her to love the moment, which she can elongate by observing the drops of moisture on the underside of a leaf or untangling the smells of a jungle grove one by one. She prefers sensing to thinking and feeling. And communicating, at least in language. She probably thinks of sensing as a form of communication. Something passes between her and the thing perceived. There’s a transmission, and for her, it’s a kind of talking. Whether this serves her or not, I don’t know. She can process more sensory information than any human, but it’s also a burden. And it sets her apart, distances her from others, especially humans who, in her mind, often neglect the sensuous world.

Q: We learn that Bike’s past is tied up with a creature named Orn who previously taught Bike but seems to have nefarious intentions. Bike reflects on how, “There was too much information, a mountain of data, most of it incorrect, but people had in the past become dependent on it: they worshiped the mountain, fed on it, built their homes in it, loved it and hated it and saw within it entire cosmoses they chose to enter and exit at will.” Knowing what he knows, why does he make the decisions that he does? Do you think he is right?
A: It would very much be against the spirit of the novel for me to judge Bike’s actions as either right or wrong. The Idiot’s Garden flattens all categories, ontologically, socially, as well as morally. It’s not hard relativism, but our contemporary notions of good and evil would seem crude and myopic to the inhabitants of this world. Bike struggles with his decisions, not in spite of his immense store of experience and knowledge, but because of it. He has, figuratively speaking, been in everyone’s shoes. He has perfect empathy. Imagine it: every act is simultaneously right and wrong depending on where you’re standing. It would be terrible, paralyzing. Every creed would be your own. You’d be drawn and quartered by incompatible beliefs. This is why Bike deliberates and doubts. He doesn’t want to deface anyone’s experience of value, but he also knows that to act, to do anything at all, is to place limits on others. “Life is robbery,” as Alfred North Whitehead put it, but we can take some consolation in the fact that this isn’t primarily a moral doctrine but a metaphysical one, not that that makes Bike’s decisions any easier.

Q: Seed/Sefed experiences a rough start: “Sefed used to believe that if he thought hard about something he wanted, it would come to him, but life didn’t work that way: when he was sick, he had tried to imagine himself better as he watched the snails eat paint from the walls, willing his body to recover with visualization as strong as his wan mind allowed: he had charged his blood with the power of Nameless’s ancestors and stuffed his muscles full of dandelions—but nothing happened. It was the fish, in the end, something outside of himself.” In what ways does Seed develop, or not, in the novel?”
A: When Seed is healed of his illness, his name changes, but what does that really mean? People seem to have difficulty with this: two different names for the same character. An early reader of The Idiot’s Garden thought this shift was incredibly confusing and suggested I ditch the idea. How much of a transformation does Seed undergo when he becomes Sefed? Does anything really change except his name and his health? Many magicians and witches believe names are significant: once you know a person’s name, you have some power over them. There’s a connection between name and person. Call it sympathy. Poke a name with a needle, and maybe the named will bleed; grow a clover in the earth of their vowels, and maybe the named will have good luck. And so on. But, of course, magic doesn’t exist; this is science fiction after all.

Textually, the name change helps sort time. There’s an incoherence of time in the novel; many of the events play out nonlinearly, including the final chapter. If Seed is called Seed, this indicates to the reader that the events described occur before his healing in the first chapter.

Q: Some sections or chapters of the book tell stories seemingly distinct from the main plot—or separate but related. In the chapter called “Phototropic Maps,” a woman enters and moves through plants. Seed has a connection to Dr. Al-Harith, who in “The Doctrine of Signatures” meets with the physiognomist—this chapter falls in between ones directly about the main characters and is mostly written in columns. What would you say is the structure of this book? How do you see the chapters composed of columns relating to the rest of the book?
A: The interstitial chapters, formatted after medieval broadsheets that were used to spread news of monsters, miracles, and wonders, offer glimpses of the world from other perspectives and angles. Like the broadsheets, they are a kind of news, broadcasts of strange or profound creatures or phenomena in the form of parables, prose poems, or more straightforward narratives. They arise naturally from the chapter preceding them. “Phototropic Maps,” for example, occurs after a chapter in which Bike praises the virtues of plants. “The Doctrine of Signatures” occurs after Sefed wonders where the doctor might have wandered. The structure of the book is very plantlike or fungal, a network of interdependent entities, nourishing and feeding off one another. I’m obsessed with the relationship between part and whole, individual and collective, and in The Idiot’s Garden, I hoped to reconcile this mythical dichotomy in form.

Q: The title, The Idiot’s Garden, evokes a lot of things. How did you decide on this title?
A: The title came first, which happens pretty often. As far as I remember, it appeared whole cloth out of the void. Spontaneously. Which is fitting because spontaneity as creative act, as art, plays a small role in The Idiot’s Garden. Unfortunately, I can’t remember what I might have been thinking about, reading, watching, listening to at the time that might have inspired it.

Q: You teach writing and literature in the Metro Detroit area. What types of writing and literature do you teach, and what draws you to teaching?
A: I needed a career change after the pandemic, and I’ve always had vague thoughts of being a teacher, so I went back to school to become a college lecturer. I don’t know why I wanted to teach when I was younger, but now that I’m doing it, it seems like what I should be doing. I teach a lot of composition, first-year college writing, as well as creative writing and a literature course on comics. I like teaching aesthetics. It’s important, but we neglect it, especially at this moment in the humanities, and I think the results are obvious if you look around at the world.

Q: What are you reading and recommending?
A: I haven’t been obsessed with a book in a while. The last book I read was A Chain of Chance by Stanislaw Lem, a whodunnit where probability is the killer. I’ve been watching more movies recently than reading books. Right now, I’m making my way through John Waters’ favorite movies of 2025. He comes out with a list every year. Eddington tops his list, and I liked it more than I expected. Ari Aster is so good at depicting how awkward humans are. Awkward and almost maliciously anxious.

Q: What is next for you and your writing?
A: I haven’t written much since revising the final version of The Idiot’s Garden. It’s been a difficult year. I’m currently in the research stage for my next project, a dark sword and sorcery novella.

Martha Stuit is a former reporter and current librarian.