"I emerged from the depths of a burning ocean, forever baptized by its radiant light."
I’m excited to share with the world the craziness that goes on inside my head. I’ve been working on a science-fiction space opera for about a year. I’m currently querying literary agents for representation where I hope to find an agent who loves this story just as much as I do. Without giving away too much, I’ll describe what the story is generally about and some of the themes that it touches on.
Humans in the late twenty-seventh century search for intelligent alien life in order to stop a restrictive new religion’s influence from spreading. Finding such evidence proves to be most difficult, as humanity has created a world where augmented and virtual reality are indistinguishable from the real world. This desperate search and the cosmic horrors it unearths serves as a backdrop to the machinations of governments, faiths, and factions across several star systems, and how each works to exert their influence over hundreds of billions of people.
Throughout the work’s abundance of spectacle, mystery, and political intrigue are various philosophical ideas I want the reader to encounter and ponder. Here are some of those themes that my novel aims to explore:
Upholding Legacy
We create our own idea of our ancestors and how they lived. Even as technology advances and we have more records of communications, of how their muscles move and their eyes stare as they speak, we still create unique images. Those may not accurately capture who they actually were. Several characters confront these issues as they try to live up to those who came before them.
In addition to family legacy, this world explores the legacy of humanity as a whole. Which parts of our history do we hold closest as we ascend to the stars? One of the central conflicts of this story revolves around human’s ability to manipulate their minds and bodies well past the point of being recognizably “human.” This is essentially a story asking at what point do we stop living as humans and become something else?
Defining Reality
The realism of 3D graphics in videogames and movies have improved tremendously just in my lifetime. As augmented and virtual reality becomes more accessible, I wanted to imagine a world where it’s difficult to interpret what is “real.” As characters spend weeks and even years inside of virtual environments, some notice subtleties that expose the façade, though they’re unsure if they are defense mechanisms forcing them to remember that the virtual worlds aren’t truly real.
Scientists become so alarmed with the threat of humans remaining in VR forever, that they create special shape-shifting technology to entice humans to spend more time in the real world, feeling it necessary in ensuring humanity’s future.
Relationship Between Humans and Artificial Intelligence
Today, artificial intelligence continues to advance at an almost unsettling pace. This story explores a world almost seven hundred years in the future, where humans can barely fathom a fraction of AI’s capabilities. I wanted to explore some of the diversity amongst AIs and even some perspectives not explored in other sci-fi media. I introduce AIs humans use specifically for defined tasks such as labor and defense, AIs whose capabilities far exceed humans’ understanding, and AIs who behave and even pray similarly to humans.
Hope this at least gives you some of my mindset when writing this book. I’ll give updates as I move through the trenches of the publishing industry, hoping to find the perfect representation and home for this story that I love so much. I hope that you’ll end up loving it even a fraction as much as I do.