Science explainers, craft essays, and reading lists from the author of The Substrate Series and The Classical Zone.
— Science
This is the question people most want an answer to and most distrust themselves for wanting. The honest position — the position that takes seriously both what science has established and what it has not — is more complicated than the standard dismissal.
— Science
Physics has a problem it doesn't like to talk about. It has been sitting in the foundations of quantum mechanics since the 1920s. The observer problem is not a historical curiosity — it is an open question about the nature of measurement itself.
— Science
The double-slit experiment is the most famous result in quantum mechanics. Richard Feynman called it 'the only mystery.' And yet there is a question at the centre of it that almost nobody answers — not because the answer is unknown, but because it is uncomfortable.
— Science
In 1995, the philosopher David Chalmers proposed a distinction between the 'easy problems' of consciousness and the 'hard problem.' Thirty years later, the hard problem is still an open question in philosophy and science — and physics cannot ignore it.
— Science
The question sounds like pop science. It is not. It is a serious question in the foundations of physics, and the honest answer is more complicated than either the enthusiasts or the dismissers tend to acknowledge.
— Reading List
A reading list for the intersection of grief and science — books that take both seriously without sentimentalising either. These are the books that shaped the emotional world of Wherever It Leads.
— Reading List
There are many books that claim to explain the connection between quantum physics and consciousness. Most of them overclaim. Here is a reading list for the serious version of the question — books that take the science seriously without pretending it says more than it does.
— Science
There is a question at the heart of quantum mechanics that the textbooks tend to skip past. It is not a question about the mathematics. It is about what the mathematics means. This is the measurement problem. It is not solved.
— Science
Quantum field theory is the most successful physical theory ever devised. It underlies every piece of technology built in the last century. And it raises, without resolving, the same foundational questions about reality that the Substrate Series is built on.
— Writing
I did not set out to write a novel about quantum physics. I set out to write a novel about grief. The physics came later — and changed everything. Here is what five years of following the science taught me about the story.
— Science
The Substrate Hypothesis is the central claim of the Substrate Series: that space is not fundamental, and that the structure from which it emerges is not purely physical in the usual sense. Here is what it claims, what evidence it is built on, and where the real physics ends and the fiction begins.
— Behind the Books
A guide to The Substrate Series: reading order, the main characters Leo Alderman and Sarah Chen, the central themes, and what to expect from Books 1 and 2.
— Series Guide
The Substrate Series is five novels of literary science fiction built on a single scientific premise: the hypothesis that the substrate of physical reality is an attending mind. Here is what it is and what it isn't.
— Science
There is a question at the center of the Substrate Series that the series takes about five novels to answer. The question is this: if the substrate of physical reality is an attending mind, what does that mean for the dead?
— Series Guide
The Substrate Series is five novels. They tell one story. They are designed to be read in order. All five are available now.
— Science
This post is about the scientific infrastructure of the Substrate Series: the actual physics the novels are built on, where that physics is settled, where it is contested, and where the series departs into hypothesis.
— Writing
The genre means something specific to me. Not science fiction decorated with literary prose, and not literary fiction that happens to involve physics. Something at the intersection — a place where the rigour of hard science and the rigour of literary character work are both fully present, neither subordinated to the other.
— Science
The Substrate Series is built on real physics. Not physics as metaphor, not physics as decoration, but the actual published science of quantum field theory, the observer problem, and the hard problem of consciousness.
— Science
The science behind The Soil. What soil microbiology actually reveals about the complexity of the ground beneath our feet — and why the discovery at the heart of the novel is not as far from current science as you might think.
— Craft
The practical reality of writing literary fiction while working full-time in tech and raising three children. The schedule, the discipline, and the specific quality of writing produced in the margins.
— Craft
How the scientific observer problem — the act of observation changes the observed — maps onto the literary problem of character. The meta-question beneath both the books and the writing of the books.
— Behind the Books
The thematic connections across the catalogue. How The Dimming and The Soil are asking the same question from different directions, and how both connect to the Substrate Series.
— Writing
The genre positioning. Why these books belong on the literary fiction shelf and the science fiction shelf simultaneously. The comp titles. The readers these books are for.