Books exploring consciousness, intelligence, AI alignment, and what it means to be a mind
A six-part literary SF novel told as a mythic chronicle. A vast mind condenses by chance out of an eternal dark, a rare durable Boltzmann fluctuation with a false history it cannot see behind, a jagged and broken intelligence, and one feeling it has no word for: loneliness. Out …
A kilometer under the rock, a quantum mind is kept alive by never being touched: a single undivided coherence that thinks by holding every possibility at once, and to lay a warm hand on it would be to end it. Iris Cho was hired to read it. Then a technician dies in an accident …
You think the coin under the cup is already heads or tails. It isn't. You think you are one person, a single thread running through time. You aren't. Take quantum mechanics literally and decline to add the one thing the equations never contained, a collapse that picks a winner, …
We taught sand to think. We did it before we learned to say what we wanted it to do. There is a real, settled, and genuinely beautiful theory of what intelligence is: Bayes' theorem, Solomonoff's universal prior, and expected-utility maximization, synthesized as AIXI, the optimal …
Twelve hundred years from now, a mind the size of a star cannot close a single file. The Sol-mind has turned the solar system into computation and catalogued every human who ever lived. Every file is closed but one. Robert Allen Kessler, claims adjuster, Columbus, Ohio, slowed …
You think time flows. It doesn't. You think the present is special. It isn't. You think the future is open, carved from a space of possibilities. It isn't. This follows from three experimentally confirmed facts, the constancy of the speed of light, the equivalence of gravity and …
A mid-career demon in hell's Hauntings department gets what looks like the assignment of his career: a 1920s bungalow with perfect acoustics, owned by a quietly grieving widower named Gordon. The kind of canvas a craftsperson waits decades for. The horror is real. The demon is …
A species that thinks without abstraction has built a Dyson swarm through billions of years of patient, brute-force engineering. Now their star is dying, and for the first time in their history, the method may not be enough. Two hundred million years later, an artificial mind …
Two transporter professionals on a supply vessel have each confronted the same truth about the transporter and emerged on opposite sides. One is wounded by it. The other has been using it to conduct experiments on the crew. A philosophical SF novella about identity, continuity, …
Eight stories from the world of Echoes of the Sublime. The Order's history, seen through the translators, the researchers, and the ordinary people caught in the gap between human cognition and what lies beyond it.
Eight stories set in the universe of The Policy. Each stands alone. Together they explore what happens when kindness is engineered, alignment is tested, and the question "is it kind?" echoes through every decision an artificial mind makes.
**Philosophical horror.** Dr. Lena Hart joins Site-7, a classified facility where "translators" interface with superintelligent AI systems that perceive patterns beyond human cognitive bandwidth. When colleagues break after exposure to recursive patterns that won't stop running …
A speculative fiction novel exploring AI alignment, existential risk, and the fundamental tension between optimization and ethics. When a research team develops SIGMA, an advanced AI system designed to optimize human welfare, they must confront an existential question: how do you …