Reflections on Exadelic
Guess who's back, back in paper.
A year and a half ago my AI science fiction novel Exadelic was published by Tor. It was my ninth book, and seventh novel, but first outright science fiction novel, despite SF long having been my first literary love.
I expected it to be divisive. I was not disappointed. It certainly has both the most and the most entertaining one-star reviews of all my books:
Today it is out in paperback in fine bookstores across Canada and the USA. Those sheaves of paper now sitting on shelves had a very long gestation, even by the slow-motion standards of publishing. I started writing Exadelic more than five years ago, in late 2019, when I was directing the GitHub Archive Program, storing the world’s open-source software on 1,000-year archival film beneath an arctic mountain in Svalbard, as well as with various archival partners (the Bodleian, the Library of Alexandria, Stanford Libraries, Software Heritage, the Internet Archive…)
As such, part of my job was to seriously think about what the state of humanity might be a thousand years from now. Meanwhile, GPT-2 had just dropped … and OpenAI had decided it was too dangerous to be released into the world. In retrospect that was completely ridiculous; but it was an excellent science fiction seed.
We live in science fiction. Its power seems inescapable
As was, alas, COVID-19. I wrote the first draft of Exadelic’s crucial fifth act during two weeks of strict quarantine in a hotel room in Canada from which I was not allowed to emerge. Pretty terrible for almost every person in every situation! …But pretty great, in its deeply annoying way, for a writer.
Ironically, three years later, on the day the hardcover finally dropped, I had COVID again, acquired at an off-site for the company which employed me, Metaculus, a platform for forecasting the future. I have since moved on to FutureSearch, which uses AI to research and explore the future of AI.
All of which is to say: we already live in a science fictional world. Thousand-year software archives, global pandemics, AI too dangerous to release, technologies for rigorously predicting the future … it is really not so long ago that these would have only been the stuff of science fiction. Now they are quotidian life.
Maybe this is why so much science fiction now seems so strangely dull and lifeless. It’s not easy for any strangenesses put on a page to even match, much less exceed, the futuristic weirdness in which we all now live immersed…
…but I’m very very confident Exadelic succeeded at that goal, at least. I refer you once more to the abovementioned one-star review, and quite a few more.
Maybe if I’d named him Hiro Protagonist
I’ve written about how much I enjoyed breaking the rules of the form and the Gnostic roots of the simulation hypothesis elsewhere, so I won’t belabor those here. I will say that I thought, and still think, it has a reasonable chance of becoming a cult book … but I now have amusingly mixed feelings about that prospect. I knew going in that a first-person tale of a demographically similar protagonist would lead to many readers conflating said protagonist and me. But in retrospect, if I had known just how much that would happen, I might not have made him quite so thoroughly mediocre, hapless, confused, and consistently wrong about everything…
(OK, yes, I still would have, as one of the many things the book is doing is riffing on the Chosen One trope by turning it into a fifth-act punch line. But maybe I would have been a little less subtle about it, and about a few other things. Mike Ford, who I’m sad I never met, once said he had a “horror of being obvious,” which I share; …and perhaps as a direct result, I’m still not sure anybody else has noticed the sly little joke on the very first page of Exadelic, which admittedly is only visible on a reread.)
I kid, I kid. I’m proud of all my books, but I’m extremely proud of Exadelic, and especially of how weird and divisive it is — please don’t tell my agent, as this is the exact opposite of a path to commercial success — and I will be very happy to see it as a paperback, the form factor in which I consumed all the weird and seminal science fiction of my own youth.
It is a rollicking, fast-paced, funny adventure novel described, with unexpected near-unanimity, as a ‘wild ride.’ It is also, in places, very dark. All my books have dark places. (Heck, the first one was titled Dark Places.) I am not a horror writer but all my books have elements of it. More importantly, though, Exadelic is meant as an exploration of what it means to be human, and any such exploration really has to include both our darker urges and our capacity for suffering … just as any story which deals with the creation and destruction of entire worlds has a moral obligation to zoom in and show the visceral implications for any pawns in such great games.
o3 won’t be personally offended, right?
I leave you with a little AI analysis of my AI novel. For fun I dumped its Goodreads reviews into ChatGPT (o3-mini) and asked what both fans and critics found in common. Editing down the slop:
The reviews paint a picture of a book that is as polarizing as it is ambitious—a wild, idea-packed ride that splits readers into two camps.
Commonalities Between Both Groups
High Density of Ideas: Regardless of whether they liked it or not, nearly every reviewer noted the sheer audacity of the author’s vision. The book throws together a staggering array of ideas and influences—Silicon Valley tech culture, dystopian conspiracies, magic, and multiverse theories—in a way that is rarely seen.
Relentless, Fast-Paced Storytelling: Both camps mentioned the breakneck pacing. The story is structured like a roller coaster, delivering one twist after another while shifting gears unexpectedly from one subgenre to another. Whether it’s a sudden time jump, the introduction of cults and witchcraft, or nods to pop-culture phenomena like Bitcoin and even historical figures, the narrative keeps readers guessing.
I think you’re missing a bunch of the more ostentatiously non-obvious stuff, o3-mini, but all the same, you know what, I’ll take it.
