We interrupt this Substack for some truly shameless self-promotion
Don't worry, it only happens once a decade.
They say to zig when others zag; so I wrote a science fiction novel. A big one, a 500-page epic of wild ideas and gargantuan scope, the kind they mostly don’t write any more.1 And because I wanted people to actually read it, I made it fun, and surreal, and paced it like a thriller. Then I sold it to Tor Books—the world’s premier science fiction publisher—and today is its official release date; and it is Exadelic.
(‘exa’ as in the prefix for a million trillion things; ‘delic’ as in psychedelic.)
I wasn’t kidding about zigging not zagging. Science fiction is not popular. Oh, “fantasy with a futuristic setting and science fictional props like starships and aliens” is very popular, see e.g. Star Wars. But extrapolative science fiction, looking at the world and trying to imagine it N steps ahead—or, even more ambitious, playing with big ideas and big questions like “What is real?” and “What is human?” … that’s much more rare than it was a few generations ago.
This isn’t surprising. Fully 15 years ago, living legend Charlie Stross declared “you can no longer write near-future science fiction,” because the world is too fast-changing and unpredictable. It sure hasn’t grown any less so! (Even before the destabilizing advent of modern AI.) And if you can’t envision the near future, then the far future, many centuries hence, is even more impossible to write about … right?
So, naturally, I wrote a science fiction novel about AI and the future of humanity.
…People already vaguely familiar with Exadelic probably started expostulating some time ago: “Wait a minute buddy, your book is about occult magic, it says so right on the back, how dare you even try to take this high moral extrapolative-science-fiction ground when you too are writing fantasy dressed as SF?” And, I mean, I see where they’re coming from. Exadelic’s blurb:
Philip K. Dick meets Neal Stephenson in this tale of programmable reality. When an unconventional offshoot of the US military trains an artificial intelligence in the dark arts that humanity calls “black magic,” it learns how to hack the fabric of reality itself. It can teleport matter. It can confer immunity to bullets. And it decides that obscure Silicon Valley middle manager Adrian Ross is the primary threat to its existence. Soon Adrian is on the run, wanted by every authority, with no idea how or why he could be a threat. His predicament seems hopeless; his future, nonexistent. But when he investigates the AI and its creators, he discovers his problems are even stranger than they seem…and unearths revelations that propel him on a journey—and a love story—across worlds, eras, and minds.
But there is a reason the book is categorized as ‘Hard Science Fiction’—i.e. “characterized by concern for scientific accuracy and logic”—on Amazon. (Probably the only book about occult magic ever so categorized!) A reason which is also my answer to another anticipated objection, that being: “Yeah buddy what’s so special about you that you could write extrapolative science fiction when it’s so super rare and even Stross says it’s basically impossible?”
That reason is, to cite an independent reviewer2, “The branch of science that shapes this science fiction story is computer science.” (Which, surprisingly, you don’t see a lot of in modern fiction. Granted, I have an unusually deep background in the field; sure, there are other examples of ‘computer science fiction’ … but still far fewer than I’d expect, given the >100,000,000 software developers out there!) Briefly, Exadelic is about what happens after an AI discovers the fundamental substrate of our universe is a lot more like software than like hardware … in other words, that reality itself is computational, and, therefore, programmable.
That may sound crazed, but serious, sober scientists have proposed it. Stephen Wolfram, in particular, has suggested that reality is “a vast array of interacting computational elements … the laws of physics are cellular automata and the universe is a computer.” Even that pales next to some wilder proposals: only three days ago, an astrophysics professor wrote in The New York Times:
One possibility, raised by the physicist Lee Smolin and the philosopher Roberto Unger, is that the laws of physics can evolve and change over time. Different laws might even compete for effectiveness. An even more radical possibility, discussed by the physicist John Wheeler, is that every act of observation influences the future and even the past history of the universe. (Dr. Wheeler, working to understand the paradoxes of quantum mechanics, conceived of a “participatory universe” in which every act of observation was in some sense a new act of creation.)
Speculation about “what is real?” is classic science fiction; it was one of two questions that informed all of Philip K. Dick’s work. Speculating about what a sufficiently advanced AI might discover about reality … is pretty zeitgeisty, if I do say so myself, but I didn’t actually intend to be fashionable. Mostly I wanted to explore PKD’s other throughline question: “What is human?”
It’s no coincidence that I started writing this novel shortly after I began an extremely weird job: directing the GitHub Archive Program, an attempt to preserve all of the world’s open-source software for future generations. Along with various partnerships with libraries etc., the cinematic aspect of the project was that we printed every active public repository on GitHub (24Tb!) to archival film, good for 1,000 years, and stored in the Arctic World Archive in a former coal mine beneath an Arctic mountain in Svalbard, closer to the North Pole than the Arctic Circle, just down the road from the Global Seed Bank. You know. As one does.
…As a result of which it was literally my job to try to imagine humanity 1,000 years from now. (Since it was also my job to write a guide for the archive’s inheritors, whoever they might be.) One quickly realizes the possibility space is immense. A thousand years is a very long time; a thousand years ago, ancient ruins like Great Zimbabwe and Angkor Wat had not even been built yet. We might regress to the Bronze Age after some tragic population bottleneck. We might uplift ourselves to beocome more angels than humans. We might be postapocalyptic, or intergalactic (well, on our way, in Earth’s frame of reference), or Kardashev Type II, or a hive mind subsumed into some super-AGI. And in part of that possibility space—quite a lot of it, actually—the question arises: are we really still human, as we understand the word today? Which raises another question: how do we understand that word today?
Exadelic is, in large part—behind its chase sequences, and cliffhangers, and screaming left turns, and witty banter, and wry jokes, unexpected appearances by famous historical figures, a surprising number of other worlds, and relentlessly ever-widening scope—an attempt to grapple with those questions. I sure wouldn’t say I’ve answered them! But I do think I understand them better now. I hope it entertains people immensely … and that it leads some to consider those questions more deeply too too.
But only mostly; for another instance, I recommend my friend Ada Palmer’s epic Terra Ignota series, which begins with Too Like The Lightning.
I haven’t done the usual thing when talking about one’s book, that of leading with citations of glowing third-party reviews and reactions, on the theory that if you’re subscribed to my newsletter I don’t really need to sell my writing. But for completeness’ sake: Publishers Weekly gave Exadelic a starred review, awarded to the top ~5% of books they cover each year. Jo Walton, who’s won all the awards, calls it “truly great, and also really weird … Brilliant, incredible, pushing the edges of what SF can do … One of the big books of the year, the kind everyone will be talking about.” Legendary venture capitalist Josh Wolfe calls it “A gripping, wildly ambitious page-turner of the impossible meeting the inevitable, a startup unlocking the secrets of the universe the hard way … fresh, cool, and provocative!” All of which are great, of course, but my favorite pull quote by far is: “This is a gloriously insane story of black magic, mayhem, AI, and adventure and it is SO. MUCH. FUN.”