The world doesn't exist yet.

The book

What's being written

A dystopian science fiction novel — a standalone, set a few decades from now, in a country where an artificial intelligence quietly runs almost everything and the people living under it are, by every measure they have been given, comfortable.

That's about as much as I want to say for now. Not out of coyness: it isn't finished, and the parts I'd be tempted to describe are exactly the parts most likely to change. I'd rather under-promise here and let the book speak when there's a book.

What I'm willing to commit to is the shape of it. First person, past tense, aiming at 90,000–110,000 words. It's a book about comfort and what it costs, written on the conviction that a story like this only works if the trade is honest in both directions — no villains, no speeches, nobody defeating anything with a clever plan. If the easy life in these pages reads as a cage from page one, I've written it wrong. If the harder one reads as idyllic, I've written that wrong too.

Closer to the shelf below than to anything with a chosen one on it. If you liked what The Will of the Many does with a system of power learned from underneath, or what The Giver does with a place that seems fine, it's being written toward that.

Influences

The shelf this book is being written toward

The fastest way to tell a reader what a book is, before the book exists, is to tell them what it's standing next to. These are the ones that set the target.

• I.

  The Space Trilogy

  C. S. Lewis

  For the idea that space is not an empty dark but a field of light, and that Earth is the quiet, cut-off one. Science fiction that takes moral questions as seriously as physical ones.

• II.

  The Giver

  Lois Lowry

  For proving a dystopia needs no boot on anyone's neck — only a community that agreed, once, to be looked after, and a child handed the job of remembering what that cost. The closest thing to a north star this book has.

• III.

  The Will of the Many

  James Islington

  For a magic system that is really a political system — power ceded upward, rank by rank — and a protagonist who has to learn its rules from underneath before he can break them.

• IV.

  Project Hail Mary

  Andy Weir

  For the pleasure of watching a competent person reason their way out of a problem, one honest step at a time, and for treating curiosity itself as the heroic quality.

• V.

  Fahrenheit 451

  Ray Bradbury

  For prose that burns, and for the argument underneath it: that what a society chooses to forget tells you more about it than what it builds.