WritingMarch 15, 2026
Why I Write Literary Science Fiction
The genre means something specific to me. Not science fiction decorated with literary prose, and not literary fiction that happens to involve physics.…
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Wherever It Leads
The Instrument
Contact
Grammar
The Oldest Conversation
The Dimming
The Soil
About
Blog
Contact
The Work
The Books
The Substrate Series
Wherever It Leads
What if the substrate of reality is not what physics assumes?
The Instrument
The facility in the mountain. The signal that should not exist.
Contact
The substrate responds. The oldest conversation begins.
Grammar
Four grammars. Four ways of describing what cannot be described.
The Oldest Conversation
The conversation the substrate has been waiting to have.
The Territory
What These Books Are About
Science
The physics is real. The quantum mechanics is published. The soil microbiology is current. These books are built on the science, not decorated with it.
Consciousness
What is the relationship between the observer and the observed? What happens when you follow the data wherever it leads — even when it leads to questions that science was not designed to ask?
The Human Cost
Every discovery has a cost. Every truth has a weight. These books are about the people who carry the weight — the physicist going blind, the soldier whose noise won't stop, the neurochemist who publishes too fast.
"The cost is always personal. The discovery is always larger than the person who makes it. The gap between the personal and the larger-than-personal is where the stories live."C.M. Swinney
From the Desk
All PostsLatest from the Blog
ScienceMarch 22, 2026
The Physics Behind the Substrate Series
The Substrate Series is built on real physics. Not physics as metaphor, not physics as decoration, but the actual published science of quantum field t…
Read moreScienceMarch 29, 2026
Soil Is Not Dirt
The science behind The Soil. What soil microbiology actually reveals about the complexity of the ground beneath our feet — and why the discovery at th…
Read moreFor readers of Ted Chiang, Richard Powers, and Andy Weir.
Begin with Book One