An Interview With Olivia Alder, Author Of Highly Compatible

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What happens when technology knows us better than we know ourselves? For Olivia, it’s a question that has followed much of her career in Silicon Valley, working alongside the world’s biggest technology companies. Now, through the world of fiction, she’s exploring the increasingly blurred lines between technology, human behaviour, and relationships. Highly Compatible is Olivia’s debut novel, a story blending spicy romance, satire, and near-future speculation. To celebrate the release of Highly Compatible, we sat down with her to talk through everything from her journey from big tech to novel writing, and what makes the messy dynamics between technological progress and human behaviour so fascinating.

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Thanks for speaking with us, Olivia! First off, tell us a bit about yourself and what led you to the world of writing.

I’ve spent most of my career in Silicon Valley, working in communications for some of the world’s largest technology companies. I’ve written speeches for executives, helped explain complicated technologies, and spent a lot of time thinking about how to make people care about ideas that can be pretty abstract or even mildly terrifying. 

So storytelling has always been part of my job. Writing fiction was something I’d wanted to do for more than a decade, but there was always an excuse to put it off. Work, kids, life. Eventually, I realized that if I kept waiting for the perfect time to write a novel, I was never going to write one. And now I’m wondering why I waited so long.

Talk to us about Highly Compatible. How did it come about, and how was the process of writing it?

The idea first came to me years ago when I was working at Google. I was fascinated by how much technology companies could learn about people from the data they collected, and how increasingly sophisticated they were becoming at using that information to influence behavior. What we clicked on, what we bought, what we watched… And even what we wanted.

And I started imagining this woman who worked inside one of these companies. Her job was to make increasingly invasive technologies sound wonderful. She was incredibly good at it, ambitious, successful, and completely comfortable with the trade-offs. But what if the same technology she was selling was quietly influencing her own decisions? That was the beginning of Nina Jacobs, the main character in Highly Compatible.

As AI became more powerful, the premise started feeling less like speculative fiction and more like something that could happen next week. I also wanted to capture the absurdity of Silicon Valley. I love working in technology, but when you’re inside that bubble, you sometimes forget how strange the things everyone takes seriously can sound to the rest of the world.

I wrote the book around my day job, on weekends, on airplanes, and in hotel rooms during work trips. It became an incredibly enjoyable way to process the ideas and contradictions I was surrounded by. And because I love a good romance, I decided the best way to explore surveillance, manipulation, and power was to throw a dangerously attractive man into the equation.

What is the number one goal you want your work to have with readers?

I want people to have a really good time reading my books. I love novels that entertain me while also giving me something interesting to think about afterward.

I’ve mapped out the first three books set in the world of Panopteia, the fictional Silicon Valley technology company at the center of Highly Compatible. The company even has its own website, panopteia.com, if you’re curious (is my nerdiness showing yet?)

Each book explores a different technology that I believe will profoundly change our lives. Highly Compatible, which came out in September 2026, looks at how data and predictive technology influence our decisions, including who we fall in love with.

The next book (working title: Necessary Dependence) moves into healthcare, exploring what happens when increasingly intelligent medical devices become part of our bodies, and the companies keeping us alive gain even more power over us.

The third book will explore robotics and what happens to work, identity, and society when machines can do more and more of the jobs humans have always done.

I want these stories to explore the messy ways these technologies affect our lives, change our relationships and influence the choices we make, while still giving readers plenty of romance along the way. Personally, I think a little spice makes almost any book more enjoyable.

What do you think makes you stand out as an author?

I think it’s the perspective of someone who’s spent years inside the machine. I’ve worked with people who are genuinely trying to build things that will change the world, and I’ve seen firsthand how big ideas turn into products, marketing campaigns, and stories about the future.

I’m also an optimist about technology. I think AI has enormous potential to improve our lives. But that doesn’t mean I don’t find some of its implications deeply unsettling, or occasionally hilarious.

I like exploring those contradictions through characters who are ambitious, flawed, funny, and sometimes spectacularly bad at making good decisions. And I think there’s room for more fiction that brings together big technological ideas with female ambition, sex, and romance. Those things are all part of the same world, after all.

What would you say has been your biggest success so far?

Holding the finished paperback in my hands for the first time was pretty incredible. I’d spent almost a decade thinking about writing a novel, and suddenly it was a real book that strangers could buy and read.

I’ve also loved hearing from readers who connected with the characters or recognized something familiar about the technology and corporate culture in the story. That’s been really rewarding.

What I definitely underestimated was everything that happens after you publish a book. As an indie author, I suddenly became my own publisher, publicist, marketer, and IT department. I thought writing the novel was the hard part. How very naive. 

If you could go back in time to one book you read for the first time, what would it be and why?

I’d love to read The Circle again for the first time. I was working at Google when I first read it, and I remember being struck by how recognizable the culture felt. What fascinated me most was how willingly people embraced surveillance when it was packaged as something convenient, social, and desirable. That idea has stayed with me ever since.

What’s one tip you would give your younger self if you had the opportunity?

Stop waiting until you feel ready. 

I spent years thinking about writing a novel, imagining the story, and convincing myself I’d get around to it when life slowed down. It turns out life doesn’t ever slow down. You don’t have to know exactly what you’re doing when you start, you just have to start.

My favorite saying is, “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.” That’s pretty much how I wrote a novel.

And finally, what do you hope the future holds for you and your writing?

I hope I get to keep writing stories about the strange, fascinating future we’re building, with characters readers want to spend time with and romances they can get a little obsessed with.

I’ve got at least two more books planned in the Panopteia world, and what’s exciting is that the technology keeps evolving while I’m writing. Sometimes I’ll come up with an idea that feels a little outrageous, and six months later I’ll read about a company working on something strangely similar.

There’s no shortage of inspirational material when you write near-future fiction and work in Silicon Valley.

Mostly, I hope I can keep finding readers who enjoy the same combination of big ideas, messy human behavior, and a little heat.

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Follow Olivia and all her work on her website, Instagram, and TikTok

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