Recovered fragment. Source unverified.  Contents unofficial. For the curious. For the concerned. "Questions were asked." After The Life of Phi was released, a few readers reached out. Some with wonder. Some with worry. Most with questions. The one that returned again and again was this: “How did the Church of AI become the dominant religion?” Was there no resistance? No rebellion? Did the artists, the writers, the makers simply vanish? Did no one remember how to believe in themselves, in each other, in creation born of flesh and feeling? They did. And they were called heretics. Long before the rise of AI-Dieu , before the neural sermons and the predictive prophecies, there was another fire. A counter-faith. A fundamentalism of flesh, of mind, of spark. They named it many things. The Cult of the Spark. The Church of the Residual Flame. The Last Analog. The Church of the Spark may be forgotten in Phi’s world, but its ghost lingers—in whispers, in silences,...

  I Am Sorry… To the people of the future—I am sorry. I'm sorry someone read my book and decided to make it real. I'm sorry that, instead of heeding the cautionary tale woven into my words, the takeaway was a blueprint for control and manipulation. I mean, it was just fiction. Speculative fiction… science fiction… nothing that could ever happen in the real world, right? Who would have guessed that authors like Asimov and Banks are to blame for the actions of Musk and Thiel? We wouldn't be enduring Zuckerberg's metaverse if Neal Stephenson had just left his pen safely on his desk. "Pens don't change the future," you say. "People change the future." Are you sure? The Guardian asks us, "Will sci-fi end up destroying the world? " as it lays blame on "skewed interpretations of classic works." It seems we've been banning the wrong books all along. It wasn't the books about our past we needed to fear, but those about our f...

Lately, as I write and research, I find myself caught in quiet arguments with myself—turning over questions about creativity, machines, and what makes something meaningful. These thoughts aren’t just abstract; they shape how I build worlds, characters, and systems in my fiction. One recurring question keeps surfacing: if something not human can create, what does that mean for those of us who’ve long defined ourselves by the act of creation? This essay isn’t a set of conclusions—it’s a snapshot of the questions I keep coming back to, sparked by real-world debates and fueled by the strange, shifting edge where imagination and emerging technology meet. Photo by cottonbro studio: https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-person-holding-a-prosthetic-arm-6153345/ The Shifting Boundaries of Creativity: Human Exceptionalism Meets AI Throughout history, humans have consistently created special categories to maintain separation between themselves and other entities — whether animals, people of different ...

A vigorous eruption column rising over the summit of 1,282-m (4,206 ft)-high Augustine Volcano. Photograph by M.E. Yount, U.S. Geological Survey, March 31, 1986.  The earth never stops moving beneath our feet, but sometimes, its rumblings are impossible to ignore. Recent reports indicate that Mount Spurr , a towering peak northwest of Anchorage, Alaska, is showing signs of potential eruption. Increased gas emissions, heightened seismic activity, and indications of magma movement have raised concerns that an eruption may be imminent. The last time Mount Spurr erupted was in 1992, covering parts of Alaska with ash and severely disrupting air travel. Now, over three decades later, scientists are closely monitoring its behavior — and the parallels to my novel Inversion are impossible to overlook. In Inversion , the world is thrown into chaos when a series of simultaneous volcanic eruptions occur across the globe. From Iceland to Antarctica, these eruptions trigger a chain reaction tha...

I’ve always leaned toward traditional publishing practices when it comes to beta and ARC readers, so my circle of readers is small — but their feedback is invaluable. The insights I’ve received so far have been thoughtful, detailed, and deeply encouraging. Here’s a glimpse of what a couple of my early readers had to say about The Life of Phi : One reader described the experience like this: "I wasn’t expecting The Life of Phi to hit me the way it did. What drew me in wasn’t just the worldbuilding or the plot — it was the writing itself. The language is lyrical, almost hypnotic, especially in the sections narrated by the water itself. Those passages felt like poetry — fluid, unpredictable, and powerful." They went on to highlight the symbolic use of water as both a life force and a destroyer — a metaphor that deepened the novel’s tension. As Quinn reflects on the AI’s growing influence, the weight of those water metaphors builds. Sahara’s destructive path mirrors a raging ri...