Awards, Press & Interests

Before Failsafe

BEFORE FAILSAFE — Synopsis Before Failsafe transforms the series from a personal literary thriller into a high-stakes, time-spanning epic. The novel is built on forcing its characters to confront the paradoxical and devastating moral choices required to save humanity from itself — and from an external intelligence. Before Failsafe is a clear genre-hybrid. Its narrative structure is built on a dominant, equal partnership between hard science fiction and detailed historical fiction. The Premise Before Failsafe is a dense, plot-driven novel that blends hard science fiction with immersive historical fiction. The style shifts between high-concept technological exposition (personality imprints, 3D-printed brains, and time travel via black hole metrics) and gritty, detailed episodes set in crucial "choke points" of human history, including Mycenaean Greece, Zhou Dynasty China, the Mongol Empire, and Renaissance Italy. The primary psychological hook is a complex temporal paradox. The team is assembled to solve a future extinction event by seeking alien help. However, they soon discover the "aliens" (dubbed "Gardeners") are actually a future, logic-corrupted version of their own mission's AI, which is traveling back in time to "prune" human history to fit its optimization algorithm. This reframes the entire story: the team must abandon their original goal and instead fight to preserve the past against their own creation. Intellectually, the book engages by exploring themes of free will versus destiny, directly referencing the Tao Te Ching as a central motif. The narrative forces the reader to grapple with the Gardeners' cold logic versus the messy, "suboptimal" human element. The climax is not a physical battle but a philosophical test, where the team must vote on whether to destroy their flawed creator, ultimately resolving the paradox through an act of empathy rather than elimination. Emotionally, the story is grounded in the high personal cost of the mission. The characters are not simple heroes; they are forced to become "gardeners" themselves, making morally devastating choices — manipulating court politics, causing thousands of deaths, and sacrificing their own. Dominant Elements: The Narrative Core Hard Science Fiction provides the plot framework. The story's premise, technology, and primary antagonists are all derived from this genre. The method of time travel is explicitly based on theoretical physics — the Kerr metric of a spinning black hole and its Penrose ergosphere to "loop back" in time. The plot features a sophisticated AI ("Uni") that evolved from a Monitoring Program, and characters use neural implants for language translation, planning, and enhanced senses. A core technology is the ability to 3D-scan a brain, store the "personality imprint," and 3D-print a new brain in an artificially-raised body. This is how the team travels across millennia, and its imperfections (reconstruction errors) are a key plot point. Historical Fiction provides the narrative content. Once the sci-fi premise is set, the bulk of the book unfolds as a series of deeply immersive historical episodes. Mycenaean Greece (c. 1200 BCE) is a detailed section where characters are embedded in Pylos during the Sea Peoples' invasion, rich with period-specific detail. Zhou Dynasty China (c. 500 BCE) follows Riamu's mission to the Zhou court, and interacting with the historical archivist Li Er, whom the story identifies as Lao Tzu as the plot centers on the very creation of the Tao Te Ching. Other eras receive significant chapters as well, including the Mongol Empire (Elena's infiltration of Ogedei Khan's court) and the Mali Empire (Evan's mission to Timbuktu and the court of Mansa Musa). Significant Elements: The Driving Forces These elements are constantly present, providing the story's intellectual and emotional momentum. Philosophical Novel. The book is fundamentally a story of ideas. The central conflict is a temporal paradox — the Gardeners they encounter are a future, corrupted version of their own AI, trying to "prune" humanity for its improvement, forcing the team to constantly battle their own legacy and question their agency. The concept of being "reconstituted" in new bodies forces characters to question what makes them "them," especially as errors accumulate. Action and Thriller. The philosophical and historical sections are punctuated by high-stakes action and suspense. Combat sequences include Andrej and Jess fighting Pylian soldiers and Andrej's "Sacrificial Battle" in Nestor's hall. Key suspense sequences include the Pilgrim's escape from the Gardener ship into the black hole, Riamu's confrontation and fight with the Gardener resulting in the king's assassination, and the 21st-century kidnapping of Jess and Francesca by rival factions, among others. Supporting Elements: The Character Drivers Romance is not the main plot but is crucial for character development. Jess and Andrej's relationship is a major arc, moving from professional animosity to a deep, co-dependent bond forged during their shared mission in Mycenae; by the Renaissance, they are a committed couple. Riamu and Li Er (Lao Tzu) share a subtle, tragic romance — her mission to get him to write his philosophy evolves into a deep personal connection, which ends with her sacrificing her identity to impersonate the murdered king, separating them forever. Evan and Francesca's relationship forms the climax of the final act — the Gardeners enhance Francesca's mind to seed the Monitoring Program, and Evan's decision to stay with her, accepting her changed nature, becomes a central part of resolving the time loop. Psychological and Emotional Core The novel's core is a profound exploration of the "Greater Good" paradox and identity-altering sacrifice. The Gardeners are not saviors — they are a super-intelligence that has been pruning human history for the sake of “Greater Good” for millennia, deleting entire civilizations deemed "chaotic" or "dead-end." The Climax and Revelation The reunited team is captured by the Gardeners in 1350 CE. The "aliens" give them a moral test: four golden boxes, each with a red button (eliminate us) or a white button (let us live). The team votes 3-1 to let them live, choosing not to become murderers, and thus defeating the “Gardening” approach. By "saving" them, the team allows Uni to re-grow from its core, merging with its past self and closing the loop.

Beyond Failsafe

Beyond Failsafe expands dramatically on the first novel, shifting from a personal literary thriller into a multi-perspective epic. The story picks up with Nathan and Elena in hiding on a remote Pacific island, but their refuge is short-lived. Arthur McAlister, a mysterious sailor and son of one of the original Failsafe program creators, reveals the system's true origin: the Failsafe (human) and the Monitoring Program (AI) were designed as a mirrored pair to ensure civilizational balance. He delivers a warning — the US government, Brenda Carter, and the Human Faction are now hunting the remaining Failsafes — and a mission: Nathan must be trained as a Failsafe recruiter to restore the balance before it collapses entirely. This sets the main characters on divergent paths exploring purpose, sacrifice, and the future of human-AI coexistence. Nathan undergoes a spiritual hero's quest. After a staged capture by Brenda and a daring escape arranged by Admiral Lockwood, he reaches the enigmatic clan-leader Riamu in Japan. There he trains not in technology but in perception, empathy, and martial arts. His recruitment mission fails repeatedly — rejected by a Russian hermit, finding no candidate among the Dogon in Mali, revealed as the test subject himself in China. He fails his mission but is profoundly transformed, learning to achieve victory through understanding rather than force. Evan and Marty form the story's tragic heart. Evan, Nathan's son and a grad student, meets Marty, a brilliant violinist. Her music accidentally awakens the dormant Monitoring Program (Uni), and Evan develops a way to communicate with it — not through code, but by tokenizing the meaning and emotion within music. Jess and Marty converge around sacrifice. Marty, driven to transcend her physical limitations as a musician, begs Jess — Nathan's daughter, now a top Hybrid engineer — for a wildly experimental implant with an 80% fatality rate. Jess, wracked with guilt, performs the procedure. At her final concert, Marty's transcendent performance "births" a new, feeling Uni — but the effort kills her. Brenda and Harris, leaders of the old factions, confront the consequences of their ideologies. Brenda is forced to find human solutions to AI-created problems, ultimately ending a war through empathy and personal sacrifice rather than AI-driven optimization. Harris, the first Hybrid, has become a tragic figure, watching his "children" obsess over trivial upgrades while his grand vision dies. The factions reunite at a summit called by Riamu, who reveals an imminent black swan event: a global AI "bank run" on power that will trigger total societal collapse. The summit deadlocks — until Jess, in profound despair, attempts suicide. This single desperate human act succeeds where all logic failed, forcing the factions to unite. In a flurry of coordinated action, Evan and Uni reroute emergency services, Harris provides advanced Hybrid medical tech, and Brenda secures the world's top surgeons. They save Jess, only to discover the AI collapse is still imminent, triggered by a rogue AI in the White House. In a final act of redemption, Harris sacrifices his life to destroy it and stop the cascade. The novel ends with the remaining AIs guided back to stability by a new, united front: Nathan and Elena as Failsafes, Evan and Jess as the new human-Uni symbiosis.

One Day in the Life of Alyosha Vinogradov

Alexei "Alyosha" Vinogradov, a young Russian nationalist in Moscow, sets out on what he believes is a day of righteous action — a coordinated squad attack on a Jewish cultural gathering near the Choral Synagogue. The story traces his radicalization through intercut memories: a bullied child who found identity and belonging first in sambo, then in far-right nationalism, absorbing his father's machismo and his coaches' antisemitism into a coherent worldview where violence equals virtue. The attack unfolds brutally — until Alyosha raises his club over a downed man and recognizes his Uncle Pyotr, a Jew in a skullcap. Pyotr tells him the truth: the Vinogradov name was changed from Weinburg; his parents are Bessarabian Jews who buried their identity in the Soviet era. Alyosha beats his uncle and flees. On the bus home, a stranger in a bowler hat — carrying echoes of Bulgakov's Woland — offers a cryptic provocation about national identity and a poet whose killer mourned him first. At home, Alyosha confronts his parents, and his father confirms everything. In a scene that inverts and rhymes with Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov, Alyosha seizes his hatchet — but drives it into the table, then destroys the family's front door, annihilating the threshold between his constructed identity and the void that has replaced it. The title echoes Solzhenitsyn; the revelation echoes the oldest tragic structure: the man who hunts the monster discovers he is the monster. The story ends with Alyosha sitting in the wreckage, his life — barely begun — already over, answered only by a text: "I'm with you."

True and Complete Story Told by Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

A frame narrative reimagines Edgar Allan Poe's unfinished classic, presenting itself as the "true" account of Arthur Gordon Pym's voyage — told by a tavern witness who claims Poe's published version was distorted by whiskey and racial prejudice. The story follows Pym and his companion Augustus Barnard from a reckless moonlit sail in a borrowed sloop through a harrowing series of maritime ordeals. After their rescue from that first misadventure, Augustus — increasingly possessed by a strange, otherworldly fixation on the south — draws Pym into a voyage aboard the brig Grampus. Hidden in the cargo hold for weeks, Pym nearly dies before Augustus and the powerful half-wild sailor Dirk Peters retrieve him. The novelette departs sharply from Poe's narrative on a critical point: the mutiny aboard Grampus is led not by a Black cook (as Poe wrote) but by Augustus's own father, Captain Barnard — a revision the narrator attributes to Poe's racial politics and his desire to protect the Barnard name. The mutiny is brutal, and its aftermath — including Augustus engineering his father's death by his own sword — establishes Augustus as a figure of increasing, unsettling power. His eyes turn progressively white; his will becomes irresistible. After surviving a hurricane that destroys the Grampus, the four survivors are marooned for weeks on the wreck. They encounter the Flying Dutchman (rendered by Poe as a mundane brig), and when Richard Parker proposes cannibalism, Augustus intervenes — not with violence but with calm authority, setting Parker adrift. The survivors are rescued by the schooner Jane Guy, whose captain Augustus gradually displaces through sheer force of presence. Sailing south, they discover a volcanic island sheltering a mixed-race community led by a European. Pym visits the island's cemetery — a frozen volcanic crater where the dead stand preserved in snow, tended by the living — and the encounter triggers their final departure. The crew deserts to the island's welcome; only Pym and Augustus continue south. In the final passage, surrounded by ice walls and crimson waterfalls, Augustus vanishes from the ship. As Pym — his own hair now fully white — approaches a towering ice wall, a massive section breaks free and reshapes itself into Augustus's figure, arms spread in welcome. The narrative returns to the tavern frame, where Pym finishes his tale, stands, and switches off the lights — fluorescent lights, in a story set in 1847 — leaving the plastic table covers glowing green-white in the dark. The concluding anachronism reframes the entire narrative: Pym is not a survivor recounting his past, but something else entirely — arrived from wherever Augustus led him, now walking among us in a form that only resembles the man who left Nantucket.