This newsletter serializes Quibble, a novel about transhumanism and Digital Age disembodiment set on an otherworldly, far-future Earth.
Quibble doesn’t want to be a heretic. She doesn’t want her preternatural gift or any part of the bloody war it drags her into. She only wants to find her mother, vanished without a trace. But she’ll have to journey through hell for that reunion…
The year is 49371, but nobody knows it. Long ago, mysterious transhuman people called the Infinite exploited Earth’s resources to build interstellar arks, leaving the planet uninhabitable. Now, a new transhuman race — Ones — inhabit Within, a subterranean night world ruled by the artificial intelligence Unity and the powerful caretakers called Zeros. Cursed with longevity, Ones share dreams in virtual reality as they await their death and transcendence to the few remaining arks.
Clear-sighted, Quibble sees what no One should see wakeful— people’s shadows in the dark Within. Raised by heretic Zeros, Quibble chafes at Unity’s religion of control, which insists the natural sunlight Without annihilates Ones, body and soul. When Unity forces her into a loveless marriage and then her mother Quiddity disappears, she enlists the heretic Zeros’ help to take her Without and help her find Quiddity.
Aboveground, Quibble discovers a surreal, bewildering world. She falls in love with Definition, a fragile woman beset with grief over her son’s death. When Quibble’s gift of sight reignites a long-dormant Zero war, she’s hounded by the phantomlike Asuja, the messiah of a fascist vision for the Ones’ future. To prevail, Quibble must find her own powers in her human nature and her unique grasp of physical reality. But when Asuja reveals what became of her mother, Quibble’s loyalties are thrown into disarray as she struggles to learn the most elusive human trait—the ability to forgive.
Extrapolating from Clarke’s dictum that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” Quibbleexplores the heights of joy and the depths of grief as it contrasts the religion of utopian transhumanism with the Digital Age’s online epidemic of facelessness and social isolation.
I call Quibble “speculative” because it’s a hybrid novel, but it may be more apt to call it “science fantasy.” In its bones, it’s science fiction, but it reads a lot like fantasy and only gradually reveals that it’s really sci-fi.
The writing is poetic, philosophical. There’s a magic system. The story has elements of dystopia, but they’re more in the vein of classic dystopia (think Zamyatin, Orwell, or Atwood) than Young Adult books like The Giver or The Hunger Games.
Quibble isn’t a thriller, though it does have some moments of danger and edge-of-your-seat action. It’s a bit longer than Frank Herbert’s Dune. Its world-building is similarly complex, partaking of my interests in literature, linguistics, religion, mythology, and anthropology. If you delight in the sci-fi, fantasy, and dystopia of Ursula K. Le Guin, Margaret Atwood, and Octavia Butler, I believe you’ll love Quibble, too!
(See the bibliography for a complete list of my sources and inspirations.)
For years, as I rewrote and revised Quibble, I pursued publication for the novel in the traditional publishing industry. I took an MFA in poetry and matured as a writer in academia, which frowns on self-publishing, so I felt I had to publish the old-fashioned way. I queried agents and presses — I have no idea how many! At last, I admitted to myself that, for various reasons, traditional publishing’s gatekeepers weren’t taking a shine to my fiction. So I began to consider self-publishing…
It seems that an author must be incredibly prolific to self-publish via avenues such as Kindle Direct and expect to gain a readership. I’m not that prolific, so it makes more sense to serialize my fiction. Also, this way, I can engage directly with readers — I’ve yearned for it a long time — and meditate on the process by which I taught myself to write a novel, for instance by sharing excerpts from the earlier drafts, notes from my writing journal, and reflections on how my sources inspired me.
Mainly, I’m serializing the novel because I want you to read it!
Subscribing for free, you’ll get chapters of Quibble delivered to your email inbox. New chapters will be published once a week. A typical chapter is a 15-to-20 minute read.
In addition to reading Quibble, paid subscribers will receive access to draft materials, developmental notes, and my reflections on sources and the writing process.
Read the first reflection for free
Additionally, founding subscribers will receive chapters from the novella Quiddity as they’re written and a copy of Quibble if I ever publish it in print.
Group subscriptions
I offer a 20% discount on paid group subscriptions, which are ideal for book clubs, reading groups, and especially writing workshops.
Get 20% off a group subscription
Sci-fi, fantasy, and dystopia were my earliest literary loves. Eventually, I discovered the delights of poetry and songwriting. In college, I majored in English (against my family’s wishes) and edited a literary magazine. Later, I studied in the MFA program in poetry at the University of Maryland, and after graduating, I returned to my roots, beginning to write Quibble.
