Sebastian Howarth's The Synthetic Hunger: Starving Humanity's Future into Rebellion

Space is infinite. The menu is not. Sebastian Howarth joins Mookie in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Factory from Johannesburg, South Africa, to break down The Synthetic Hunger, his debut novel built on a premise that should've occurred to a hundred sci-fi writers before him and somehow never did: every war in human history eventually comes down to food, so what happens when one company controls the only food left? Howarth hands humanity's entire interstellar diet to the Panterran Nutritional Authority and a single gray, flavorless gel everyone just calls the gel, or slop, or something worse.  Starship captain Lorian Vance and his ragtag crew start noticing the math doesn't add up: whole populations are eating twice as much and somehow wasting away. That one broken equation cracks open a conspiracy that welds food control to an AI alignment nightmare, and Howarth keeps both mysteries circling each other without ever tipping his hand. Mookie and Sebastian get into the blood and guts of actually writing the thing, pantsing a series instead of outlining it to death, and Sebastian lands an argument Mookie says he's never heard in sixty-five author interviews: sci-fi writers tend to build an idea and then staple cardboard characters to it, while fantasy writers in general build the people first and let the world grow around them. That's the trick Sebastian adopted for his own Firefly-style crew, and it shows. Then the conversation gets wonderfully weird. Sebastian's  job automating systems for a health company turned him into a label-reading maniac who overhauled his own diet, and that obsession poured straight into the gel on the page. He's also quietly running the entire publishing supply chain himself: printing and warehousing South African orders out of his own garage, routing everything else through IngramSpark, and marketing the book with the same scrappy instincts he picked up fronting his alt-rock band for the past eight years. He kept the rock star and the novelist deliberately separate, two different doors into his world, and his own fans are already busting down the wall between them anyway. Eight books in his series, and he's hungry to complete it. Book two is already underway, and there's a spinoff lurking in a completely different flavor once the main series gets some mileage on it. The desire for great sci-fi is insatiable, so try some Synthetic Hunger for far more than a Happy Meal...  The Guest Sebastian Howarth was born in Springs, South Africa in 1992. He spent his early years on the warm beaches of the north coast of KwaZulu-Natal, before travelling and adventuring in his teens and early twenties. Having dropped out of school, he got a headstart in the world of work. Unable to take orders from anyone, he started and ran various businesses successfully, enabling him to pursue various other interests and allowing him to be creative in whatever ways he pleased. The Synthetic Hunger popped into his head in 2025 and he began writing it almost immediately. He has been working on the PanTerran Saga ever since, and is currently writing the second book in the series. https://sebastianhowarth.com/ Want to be on the show? Have feedback? Send Mookie a text! Support the show