Interview with Ken Fjord regarding his new book Future Sepsis
Introduction
When most writers talk about “world-building,” they mean geography, lore, and magic systems. When the author of Future Sepsis talks about world-building, he means rebuilding the world itself—ethically, philosophically, spiritually. His debut novel is a hard-sci-fi thought experiment that imagines four people resurrected a century after a civilizational collapse and forced to navigate a society rebuilt on faith, craft, and responsibility. Yet it’s also a meditation on grief, addiction, and the stubborn human will to make meaning after meaning itself has rotted.
We met to talk about Future Sepsis, but the conversation quickly became something larger: a diagnosis of modernity’s ailments and a search for the antibodies that might save us. What follows isn’t a typical promotional interview; it’s a discussion about the moral bloodstream of civilization—about whether we can survive the ideas we’ve created, and what kind of faith, labour, and humility might be required to start healing.
Interview
Interviewer:
Before we dive into the deeper themes of Future Sepsis, let’s start with a broad-strokes overview. For readers unfamiliar with your work, what’s the elevator pitch for the novel? How would you describe the story’s premise, its setting, and what sets it apart from other speculative fiction on the shelf? And if you had to capture its “DNA” in a single sentence—genre, mood, or intellectual lineage—how would you do it?
Interviewee:
Future Sepsis is a speculative fiction novel about four people who died in a plane crash over the arctic in 2024. Of the characters, one is a high school student with pretty bad grades, another is a working class man who worked his way into management, one is a young woman who had kind of a scumbag boyfriend, and the final is an older brilliant scientist who had done some groundbreaking work. Each character goes through a unique arc looking at this society and our own through a different lens, each trying to find their way in this new world. The world of 2124 is a world that recovered from a collapse the book argues we're already in now. I think it's set apart by the combination of psychological realism in the characters, the deeply laid out world the novel envisions, and the philosophical underpinnings behind the work -- A lot of "future societies" are really just today's society with different paint. The DNA contains a big mix of influences, from across time. Are the technologies that matter over generations a new computer or algorithm, or the ways human beings interact with the world and view their place in it?
Interviewer:
Let’s talk about the title. Future Sepsis is both visceral and cerebral. It suggests infection, collapse, and recovery — but on a civilizational scale. What does “sepsis” mean to you in this context, and how did that metaphor take hold?
Interviewee:
Sepsis is a condition where bacteria gets into your bloodstream. Your body starts to freak out, and it’s one of the most dangerous conditions you can have. My father had sepsis many years ago and I got to see how deadly it could be. Every hour you have sepsis, your chance of survival drops a significant amount. We traveled across the country to go to what we thought was going to be his death bed. In Future Sepsis, the sepsis is the bacteria living within our civilizational bloodstream. The modern era is long over, the postmodern era is ending, and the ideas that came out of these eras are dangerous to have in our blood.
Interviewer:
The novel’s premise — four people resurrected a century after death — could easily have become a sci-fi gimmick. But you used it as a psychological and philosophical crucible instead. How did you balance the speculative framework with such human intimacy?
Interviewee:
Very early on, I chose what I wanted to do with Future Sepsis, and one of them was a simple phrase: “The hardest of hard sci-fi combined with extremely realistic characters”. From there, it was clear the only option for me was to do both – have very real people and put them in what I tried to create as a very coherent and real world. To compromise on one is to compromise on both.
Interviewer:
One of the boldest aspects of the book is that it rehabilitates religion — particularly Christianity — not as dogma, but as a moral immune system. In an age where fiction often portrays faith as an antagonist, you made it the world’s organizing principle. Why?
Was that a philosophical conviction, a narrative experiment, or a critique of secular modernity?
Interviewee:
I first got the idea to express religion in an earnest way watching the Short Trek episode “The Brightest Star”, which explored the origins of the fish guy, the science officer on Discovery. Essentially, the point of the short was that religion is wrong and stupid and if only you can reject it then you can go on your star trek adventure. I found the piece deeply offensive – Not just because of the way it portrayed religion, but because it seemed like a lazy and stupid story. History tells us that vital societies include religions, and the fall of religion often heralds the fall of that society. From there, the question was about what religion might look like 100 years from now, and I realized there was a really interesting story to be told about religion through a post-metamodern superpositional lens – the new epistemology I created to be the basis of this new society.
Interviewer:
You’ve spoken of religion as a moral immune system and of post-metamodern superposition as a framework that allows multiple truths to coexist. Yet your reconstructed world seems explicitly Christian in tone and structure. If superposition admits several truths at once, does that extend to several faiths? Could a civilization truly grounded in your epistemology sustain Islam, Hinduism, or even revived paganism as parallel immune systems, or does Christianity ultimately remain the organizing principle? In other words, is your pluralism genuine or hierarchical—many truths under one cross?
Interviewee:
Part of the constraints on Post-metamodern superposition is that it’s embodied. What I perceive as true, or what I perceive as a fundamental truth, might not be something you perceive as true. Humans have always had to find ways to coexist with the rest of the planet. Christianity was able to see wisdom in philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle without necessarily bending their faith to them. Take the wheat, leave the chaff. In Future Sepsis, the pastor uses metaphors from the ancient Greeks such as the lotus eaters from the Odysey while explicitly noting that their religion is nonetheless false and their gods are false as Christian doctrine requires of him. Of course it is totally sensible that a post-metamodern superpositional Daoist or Muslim or Shintoist might nonetheless adopt good truths they perceive from Christianity without fully weighting that truth as overriding the religion of their ancestors.
Interviewer:
You’ve described religion—particularly Christianity—as a kind of moral immune system that keeps civilization healthy. But traditional Christianity doesn’t define itself primarily by moral function; it defines itself by faith in Christ’s divinity and resurrection. In your reconstituted world, is there still a personal, incarnate Christ, or has the figure of Jesus become more symbolic—an archetype of virtue rather than a living saviour? How do you reconcile the pragmatic, societal value of faith with its doctrinal claim about who God is?
Interviewee:
You’re probably right in all that, though multiple things can be true at once, and I’d like to think that both perspectives are true. Anywhere I’m doctrinally incorrect, I’m not intending to be so. It’s a matter of personal ignorance rather than intentional rebellion against doctrine. One of the key elements in my worldview is that we disregarded the pre-modern because of the power of modernism, but we now know that view was incomplete and we need to re-integrate the pre-modern. Part of that is of course re-integrating faith, because we are a deeply faithless society. We lack faith in God, we lack faith in the future, we lack faith in virtue. Of course Christ is a living savior, but I feel there’s a reason why the old testament comes before the new testament and it isn’t just because it happened first. It’s because we must understand what is commanded of us before we can understand how we fail to meet the mark, and once we understand we are not meeting the mark and wish to repent for our failures do we need the salvation of Jesus Christ. If we don’t know the rules, don’t think we’re doing anything wrong, then just telling people they’re saved is meaningless. As for reconciling the two, I like what St. Thomas Aquinas did, in showing that there is no need to reconcile. If God exists and God is good, then following God’s law is good because the world, though fallen and flawed, is ultimately good too.
Interviewer:
That historical correlation is compelling, but do you risk mistaking correlation for causation? If faith tends to flourish in vital societies, might it be that prosperity permits religion rather than religion producing vitality? In your reconstituted world, what stops faith from becoming simply another artifact of stability rather than its cause?
Interviewee:
That’s an important point, that it can be hard to suss out correlation and causation. However, where we don’t have more than a couple centuries of data regarding modernist ideas, we have millennia of premodern data, and we can see it. Writers more talented than me have laid out how religion comes about during hard times, the virtues of religion help bring about good times, and as the good times happen, people start to assume it’s because they’re so inherently wonderful that they stray from God. It’s shown in the bible countless times, and archaeologically we find that the bible probably isn’t lying on this point. Moses gets cocky and goes “Show me some water, bitch!” and God curses him to never step foot in the promised land.
Interviewer:
Each of the resurrected represents a different kind of resurrection — Jordan’s educational, Jonas’s moral, Maris’s emotional, Victor’s intellectual. Did you map that design from the start, or did it emerge organically as you wrote?
Interviewee:
If the theme of resurrection came through in that way, I have to admit it was an accident, but the design of the story was no accident. I wanted to explore each of these ideas using the characters as the lens, and that was always the case, but if the theme of resurrection itself came through in each person’s story, then that must have happened organically.
Interviewer:
Jonas’s chapters are harrowing — arguably the most disturbing depiction of AI addiction and digital grief since Black Mirror. Yet you treat his suffering with moral tenderness, not condemnation. What did you want readers to feel as they watched him descend into that artificial comfort?
Interviewee:
I don’t think I had a particular set of feelings in mind for the reader as I wrote it. My writing in this book tends to employ a sort of method acting where I try to become my characters. Jonas’s story was difficult to write because he’s such a difficult person to live inside in that moment in his life. He defined himself through his relationships to his family, and his family are trapped on the other side of a 100 year gap. I’m hoping anyone who has felt addiction will be uncomfortable relating to Jonas, because hopefully his combination of complicated feelings are similar to what they’ve known.
Interviewer:
When you describe “method acting” your way through each character, it sounds emotionally taxing — almost dangerous. Did you ever find yourself carrying their grief or moral confusion outside the page? How did you know when to stop being them and return to being yourself?
Interviewee:
It was definitely emotionally taxing at times, but in a sense the fact that these characters are nothing like me helped. Jonas was deeply depressed in a sense I can’t stay within. I can visit there for a few thousand words a week, but quickly have to bounce back. Some of the lines I wrote early on when he was really absorbing what he’d lost were really hard to write and they’re hard to read today because it brings me back there, but that’s just not me. Maris was another person who was just totally alien to me. She’s so frantic, so energetic, so focused on the social parts of things, and I can inhabit it for a while, but I’d need to drink a lot more coffee to stay in her. Jordan is a high school student and he’s clever but he doesn’t really go too deeply into anything, focusing more on immediate first thoughts, which is easier to visit, but for me it’s just alien matter to keep around. Victor is the opposite; very cerebral, and almost the opposite problem, where his thinking is so dense I just can’t keep up.
Interviewer:
Maris’s arc is the one that seems to break through cynicism into something like faith — but it’s earned through physical hardship, not ideology. You place her in a brutally real survival scenario rather than a sermon. Was that your way of grounding belief in action rather than abstraction?
Interviewee:
Maris’s story speaks to truths that don’t make sense in words but do make sense as you experience them. She goes through trial after trial after trial, and she’s hurt badly by the trauma of these continuous events. It’s only once she reaches the end of the trials that she finally understands there may be meaning in her suffering that she could barely understand even after everything that happens. There’s a skepticism of the transcendent wisdom of God today because we can’t draw straight lines between events, and that’s her journey: Realizing she’s part of a plan far too big for her to see and giving up control over the universe that she never had anyway.
Interviewer:
Victor’s discovery — that humanity was genetically “improved” and thus biologically weakened — reads almost as theological satire: the Fall of Man rewritten as a CRISPR update. What were you trying to explore through that scientific heresy?
Interviewee: In a sense, the entire setting is the fall of man. We are cast out of the Eden of the postmodern technological age due to our hubris and our choice to distance ourselves from reality, and so distance ourselves from God. I wasn’t choosing to write any particular thing as specifically theological, but given the themes of the book it makes sense that it could be read that way.
Interviewer:
The society of the new world is fascinating — neither utopia nor dystopia. It’s slower, poorer, but more ethical; civic virtue is earned through labour, faith, and contribution. How much of that vision was wishful thinking, and how much was a warning?
Interviewee: As a card carrying member of postmodern civilization, I guess it’s both. I spent a lot of time designing the world based on history and philosophy, and in a lot of ways it makes me feel deeply uncomfortable seeing a world like that, but on the other hand after some time I also felt like it was a comfortable and hopeful place to be in after you get used to it. If things are collapsing at the moment, I’d hope to end up in a virtuous, communitarian, faithful world like I invented rather than the possibility of something much uglier which is entirely possible.
Interviewer:
Art and music aren’t just present in Future Sepsis — they seem to function as part of the new world’s moral metabolism. Jordan’s family has music nights; community meals are punctuated by song; beauty appears to have regained its ethical gravity. In this society, art isn’t an indulgence but a way of staying human. How do you understand the spiritual or civic role of the arts in a world rebuilt on faith and responsibility? Is aesthetic creation treated as moral labour, sacred ritual, or simply as the joy that justifies survival?"
Interviewee:
That’s a tough one, because my intuition had to be that human expression is important in our future because we’ve done a huge job of either commodifying or simplifying expression in ways they’d reject in this future. People would want to be able to return to beauty, complexity, depth. They’d want to return to community. They’d want to be able to express themselves in ways that our current world doesn’t appear to let them because we all buy things built in a factory by the thousands, composed of modern design which says you ought to remove anything that’s unnecessary in a design. I imagined people would hate brutalism and they’d want a sort of post-postmodern Romantic revival. I don’t know if that’s helpful at all to answering the question. I almost feel like that drive would be instinctual like drinking when you’re thirsty, and if you explain why you did it rationally you’re actually doing so after the fact.
Interviewer:
You suggest that artistic expression in Future Sepsis arises almost instinctively—people create beauty and ritual because it’s as natural as drinking water when thirsty. But some readers might argue that this treats art as a mere byproduct of survival or community, not as something with intrinsic, possibly transcendent, value.
If your philosophical framework is all about weighing truths and living with contradictions, does “art for art’s sake” have any legitimate weight in your system, or is art always subordinate to function, morality, or survival?
Can beauty or creativity ever be a good in itself, even if it’s “useless” in the pragmatic or moral sense?
Interviewee:
Post-Metamodernism specifically includes the pre-modern as something we need to embrace once again, even the pre-epistemic. Humans feel awe in the face of great beauty, and that's a sort of truth. Postmodernism seeks to claim that beauty doesn't objectively exist, but the fact that we can appreciate art, music, and literature from across cultures and across time suggests there's something deeper, something built into our humanity. The fact that we can see animals enjoying music suggests that there's something deeper and older than humanity. This means that it does have legitimate weight, and it does have power in and of itself. The idea of disregarding something so fundamental to humanity is the sort of anti-human modernist idea I'm trying to reverse. Postmodernism, by contrast, correctly points out that other truths contradict beauty, but incorrectly claims that shows that beauty isn't true.
Interviewer:
Your prose oscillates between analytical and lyrical — full of philosophical dialogue but grounded in sensory realism. Whose literary DNA runs through your own? Were you consciously in dialogue with anyone — Dostoevsky, Le Guin, maybe Cormac McCarthy?
Interviewee:
I read Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground a few years prior to writing this book, as well as Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Growing up I was a voracious reader, and then later in life I stopped reading for a long time, then I decided to start again and for a few years I was slamming back 50-100 books per year, mostly light novels from Japan because they were entertaining and had a fun moral backbone so the MC felt like they weren’t rewarded for existing, but for holding uniquely (to the author) Japanese virtues such as being generally nice, industrious, inventive, hard working, and never giving up. I spent a period reading a lot of Twain, and one of the things I chose to do was go with the first person perspective because of something I read in the introduction to my Twain anthology: In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn he moved to a first person perspective because it was easier to slip in the views of Huck, as opposed to the third party omniscient narrator of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer which had to work harder to integrate such thoughts into its narrative.
Interviewer:
Finally, the epilogue reframes everything through the eyes of an ordinary waitress, Becky. It’s a humble ending after such metaphysical storms. Why close the book on a civilian voice instead of one of the resurrected themselves?
Interviewee:
When I was thinking of how to close out the book, the principles of post-metamodern superposition suggested that privileging any of the individual narrators I used didn’t really make sense. By making Becky the perspective of the epilogue, I let every character behave independently and without making them the most important main character. It also helped me show how the world around them might understand the characters.
Interviewer:
Your prose can be austere — clear, deliberate, even ascetic. Do you ever feel tempted by beauty for its own sake, or do you see style as secondary to moral precision?
Interviewee:
I tend to think my prose is whatever the character needs it to be in the moment. Usually I’m not aiming at beauty or moral precision. I’m just trying to be the person in that world in that moment and express what they might be thinking. Someone like Jordan doesn’t say much about much. Jonas has a rich interior and says some beautiful but very sad things. Victor rolls around ideas and facts and figures in ways that are almost like preparing for a lecture the next day. One of the things I’m most proud of in the book is how each character lives in their own world, speaks their own way, sees the world through their own lenses.
Interviewer:
The Graysonian Ethic reads as a handbook for personal integrity — responsibility, discipline, and critical thinking as the scaffolding of character. Future Sepsis, meanwhile, scales those same concerns up to the level of civilization. How do you see the moral architecture of The Graysonian Ethic evolving into the world of Future Sepsis? Was the novel always intended as the societal counterpart to your earlier, individual focus?
Interviewee:
Although in a sense the two are coming from the same person and have some similarities, Future Sepsis is really not directly related to The Graysonian Ethic. At the time, I didn’t expect to ever write another book, I only wrote the first book for my son’s birth. I didn’t even really want to publish it except that’s the easiest and cheapest way to get copies of a work. It would be another 4 years before I wrote another, and in my view, the second book was more interested in the world we live in than in just continuing the discussion I started 4 years earlier. I think the two worldviews can coexist, but they aren’t intended to be complementary like that.
Interviewer:
In The Graysonian Ethic, you write from the perspective of a father — passing on a code to a future generation. In Future Sepsis, that generational voice seems to expand: it’s as if civilization itself is the child in need of reparenting. Do you think of Future Sepsis as a continuation of that same moral lineage, or as a critique of what happens when the lessons of The Graysonian Ethic are ignored on a collective scale?
Interviewee:
You have two sets of ideas coming from the same person, but I don’t think they’re embodied in the same thing. One is about very particular advice from one father to one son, without regard for the greater ramifications of what those lessons might result in socially if everyone agreed. The other is an investigation into the path of at least one part of the entire world based almost entirely separate from that one case study. If you brush your own teeth you can’t stop global tooth decay, but if everyone does then maybe we could. That doesn’t mean that you tell your kids to brush their teeth with the vision that you’d stop global tooth decay because the scales are so different.
Interviewer:
You’ve mentioned “post-metamodern superposition” several times—the epistemology underlying Future Sepsis. It’s a concept that sounds halfway between philosophy and systems theory. Can you unpack it a bit? What does it mean in practice, especially for storytelling?
Interviewee:
Post-metamodern superposition is a new way of thinking I developed while laying out this novel. In essence, it’s the idea that multiple things are true even if they appear contradictory, and so we need to find ways to live in contradiction rather than trying to resolve it. The superposition in this case isn’t quantum superposition where things are true and untrue until the waveform collapses, but something closer to circuit superposition where everything that’s true contributes to the final answer in a different way.
Interviewer:
A striking through-line in the book is moral accountability. In this world, citizenship—the right to vote, even to belong—has to be earned through service. That’s a radical reversal of modern liberal assumptions. Were you trying to propose an alternative civic ethic, or simply explore how one might emerge after collapse?
Interviewee:
Often you tread a fine line between proposal and exploration in these sorts of things. These are the ideas that come out of starting from a post-metamodern superpositional epistemology, which to me seems like the natural evolution after modernism, postmodernism, and metamodernism. If another epistemology takes over instead, or if it develops in a different way, then maybe it won’t emerge that way. On the other hand, do we want it to? Not sure.
Interviewer:
The novel’s structure almost feels symphonic: each character a movement in a larger moral composition. How did you keep their arcs distinct yet harmonized? Was there a particular logic or rhythm you followed in deciding when to switch perspectives?
Interviewee:
Before I wrote a single line of the book I had a concept in mind of interlocking stories that help explore different parts of the world and its technology. There’s a number of perspective changes that happen either because within an arc we needed to show a different way of seeing and thinking about the world, or because the story we wanted to tell for that character was over, at least for now. As I understand it, most people don’t write a story like this beginning to end, but I did exactly that, and method acted each character while writing as if I was an actor in a play.
Interviewer:
Let’s talk about technology. Neural implants, augmented reality, AI companions—you depict all of it as both miracle and menace. Do you see technology as morally neutral, or do you think it inevitably shapes the soul of its users?
Interviewee:
Technology is ultimately bound by the humans using it. One of the key events of the book is caused by a moral failure of the characters when faced with the possibilities of technology, but another of the arcs is about one of the main characters building their moral framework so they won’t be drawn in and controlled by technology. We always have a choice how to live our lives, and it’s those choices that define the character of the things we make use of.
Interviewer:
You’ve written elsewhere about your interest in trades and tangible skill. Future Sepsis seems obsessed with the physical—craft, manual labour, even bodily suffering—as antidotes to abstraction. Is that drawn from your own life experience, or is it a philosophical counterweight to digital detachment?
Interviewee:
Over the past years, I’ve spent a huge amount of time outside with my son. During those times, sometimes I’d come back and realize some sort of “world changing event” has happened, but during that time all that mattered to me was what happened in front of me. It’s really helped me realize how much we need to get offline and into the real world. I already had an inkling of this, mind you. In The Graysonian Ethic I talk about “Fjord’s theorem” which states that a person you now online tends to stay online, and a person you know in real life tends to stay in real life. You can have a million facebook friends and nobody to help you move a couch. We can’t even say that in 50 years the Internet will still exist. Sounds insane to say, but you basically require world peace and world infrastructure to maintain a global telecom network. The first thing that’d get cut in total war would be the fiber cables.
Interviewer:
In a sense, your characters are all confronting the same question: how much of being human can you outsource before you stop being human? That feels especially timely right now, as AI begins rewriting our own cultural DNA. Do you see Future Sepsis as warning, hope, or both?
Interviewee:
I’m not sure I’d agree with that characterization of the book. In my view, the story is about people from an inhuman postmodern society struggling to re-integrate into a much more human society. The key technologies of 2124 of Neural Implants, Augmented Reality, and Artificial Intelligence are catalysts to that investigation, including finding out what happens with various juxtapositions of characters having or not having them. It’s an investigation more than an intended particular message.
Interviewer:
Your depiction of the Church is not nostalgic—it’s reformist, even hybridized with scientific rationalism. Some readers will see that as heresy, others as prophecy. How has the reaction been from people of faith?
Interviewee:
Church, like nearly every aspect of our lives, has been modernized. That word presently has positive connotations, but in reality modernism has major blind spots that premodern thinkers didn’t have. It seems inevitable that once this era is complete, a reconstitution will be required to re-integrate premodern thinking alongside insights from modern or postmodern thinking. One of the challenges of being an indie author is that you don’t have a lot of signal. You send your works out there and hope that people like what you have to say. It isn’t Wriggly Field – if you build it, people may or may not come, and there’s a very real chance that people read it, don’t read too heavily into it, and go “Nice book. Looking forward to the sequel”. I think for the sort of people who will have particular positions on some of the deeper ideas from the book, they might not really figure out what they think for a while after they read it.
Interviewer:
Every author secretly writes toward someone. Who were you writing for?
Was it the reader who’s lost faith in civilization, or the one who’s still trying to rebuild it?
Interviewee:
It isn’t very market savvy, but I tend to write for myself, but to the writer, not necessarily the reader. If I was looking to make the book I’d like to read, I’d probably slap on a Japanese pseudonym and make a lit-RPG book with an anime girl on the cover. Writing a book like that isn’t going to help me understand the world though, and reading it won’t help anyone understand the world.
Interviewer:
Finally, where do you go from here? Future Sepsis ends on integration rather than closure. Are you planning to continue this world in another novel, or do you see your next work moving in an entirely new direction?
Interviewee:
I have a cadence in mind – Novel, non-fiction, novel, non-fiction. The next book, tentatively titled “Meditations on post-metamodern superpositional epistemology” is about 5/6 written at this point. It does a deep dive on the philosophical and civilizational ideas behind this book. It started as what I expected to be mere appendixes, but it’s going to be novel length in its own right so it didn’t make much sense to have that much appendix. Following that, I’ve started the outline for the next novel in the series, which will look more at potential conflicts between this civilization and others, and how the mindset I’ve created can become pathological.
Interviewer:
Your worldview in Future Sepsis seems to reject both the atomized individualism of liberal modernity and the nihilism of late postmodernity. But some might say the society you depict—where belonging and even the vote must be earned—edges toward moral authoritarianism. How do you prevent virtue from becoming tyranny in a world built on moral accountability?
Interviewee:
That’s always a risk. In fact, arguably we’re living in a world exactly like that today, where ultra-orthodox moralists have spent years flagellating the unclean for their imperfections for personal benefit, establishing a strict class hierarchy based on that. I use a metaphor early in the book of a field anyone is free to use. Nobody will say anything if you clean up after yourself and maybe clean up a bit more, and nobody will say anything if you leave your garbage for others to deal with. The field will become what we make of it.
Interviewer:
“You’ve diagnosed our current moral climate as punitive, but your system also links belonging and virtue.
What prevents your moral hierarchy from reproducing the same pattern — purity tests and social exclusion dressed in communitarian clothing?
Who adjudicates virtue in your post-collapse world, and how do you keep the moral immune system from turning autoimmune again?”
Interviewee:
On a long enough timeline, all cities of Man are destined to fall. If you believe the predictions of astrophysicists, in about a billion years the Earth will be swallowed by atomic fire as the sun expands due to entering its red giant phase. Even the tallest tower will be nothing but dust in the fire. In the meantime, we can only do our best in the present. Ultimately, God is the judge of our virtue, and the universe He created reflects our adherence to virtue. If we can act with humility and try to maintain our virtues, then we might get to keep our post-collapse world healthy. If we do not, then it doesn’t matter who says they judge us, we will be judged and we’ll face collapse again.
Interviewer:
That metaphor of the shared field captures something almost civic in tone — the commons as moral organism. How do you square that communal ethic with the author’s position as an individual creator? Writing a novel is, in the end, an act of solitary control.
Interviewee:
Every human being is an individual acting in solitary control of who and what they choose to be. Communities are made up of individuals, and those individuals decisions and actions are the limbs which define what a community actually is. Writing a book is a work of solitary control, and if people like it they can connect with it and connect with me, and maybe something bigger grows out of it, but maybe not. In the end, “community” doesn’t decide to pick up garbage or leave it; individuals do. I do have an ethos of giving back where I can. Every one of my books has a legal release where 15 years after the date of first publication the book is released to the public domain and licensed under Creative Commons CC0 where it can’t be released into the public domain. If someone else wants to make use of the field, I’m giving it up to the community well within my lifetime.
Interviewer:
Throughout the book, reason and faith are no longer adversaries but partners. Yet that reconciliation comes only after a civilizational collapse. Do you think humanity actually needs catastrophe to rediscover balance, or can a society consciously reform itself before it breaks?
Interviewee:
Civilization can make a lot of changes and reforms, but the collapse is already baked into the cake. Multiple generations just didn't have kids, and you can't go back and have the kids you didn't have. All you can do is have kids now. Gen X had fewer kids, Millennials had fewer kids, Gen Z is looking to have way fewer kids, and Gen Alpha has a bad chance of being the same, but even if Gen Z started breeding like rabbits right this second, you still have a huge gap. The only question becomes what that collapse looks like and what the aftermath looks like. Individuals and organizations will need to stop pretending they can go around without being judged, because natural law will judge you regardless of what you want. I often like to say “Necessity is the mother of invention, but opportunity is the father” so the key is going to be seeing whether we have opportunities to reinvent ourselves before we get too deeply into the weeds.
Interviewer:
“If the collapse is inevitable, what exactly is the moral function of responsibility?
Does your philosophy risk turning ethics into mere stoicism — the virtue of accepting decay gracefully — rather than an engine for renewal?
In other words, how does one live morally in a world where outcomes are mathematically foreclosed?”
Interviewee:
Just because a society is going to face a collapse doesn’t mean every person in that society will disappear. St. Augustine saw the decline of the Western Roman Empire, but instead of just saying “who cares about being righteous?”, he wrote City of God and told Christians they ought to act with virtue and keep the flame alive. After the collapse, it was Christianity which owned the next millennium in part because of monks keeping ancient wisdom alive through their works. In the same way, if we as individuals take personal responsibility for being virtuous and doing the right thing, then perhaps the society will still collapse – we can’t control anything but what we can control – but we can pass our flame onto the next generation and do our duty in the great chain of life.
Interviewer:
You often treat demographic and civilizational collapse as unavoidable — a law of nature rather than a contingent outcome. Yet your philosophy of “post-metamodern superposition” insists on living within contradictions, not collapsing them. Isn’t absolute inevitability itself a collapse of possibility? If we accept that the population curve can’t be reversed, can we still imagine a moral or technological renaissance that redefines what survival means? In short, how do you reconcile your epistemology of openness with your demographic determinism?
Interviewee:
Superposition isn’t full relativism. The truths are weighted, and truths that come from basic physics that are undeniable, such as the truth that a baby that wasn’t born 20 years ago is not a 20 year old today, aren’t up for much debate. Those kids won’t exist. I think your question presupposes a form of collapse where I’m guessing at the form of collapse but we can’t know exactly what it looks like. If humans discovered immortality tech, then the loss of generations of kids wouldn’t be a problem and in fact might be a solution, but I don’t expect that to be the case, so the best we can hope for is a sort of managed period of decline. Maybe I’m wrong, but eventually you need to make a decision, and the decision I made was that there would be a decline relating to population collapse and resulting technological and societal collapse. I could be wrong, but enough truths converge on this idea that I doubt I’m fully wrong. One of the neat things is I don’t have to be right. I’m just a guy writing some books.
Interviewer:
You talk about civilization’s moral immune system — but every immune response risks autoimmunity. What’s the danger of your own philosophy turning on itself? Could “post-metamodern superposition” ever harden into dogma?
Interviewee:
In fact, that’s one of the biggest risks there are. Especially if it becomes “modernized” which is a very real risk. I expect to expand deeply on these ideas over the next two books in theory and in fictional practice.
Interviewer:
Throughout this conversation you describe your work with almost clinical modesty — as if you’re merely observing humanity rather than reshaping its moral architecture. Yet Future Sepsis doesn’t just tell a story; it designs a theology, an epistemology, even a civic blueprint. Isn’t inventing a new framework for truth itself a profoundly ambitious act? Do you see humility as a personal safeguard against hubris, or as an ethical stance embedded within post-metamodern superposition — a way of keeping truth distributed rather than possessed?
Interviewee:
Realistically, every single person can design whatever they want. It’s easy. Most schoolchildren have at some point absentmindedly doodled something in their notebooks while bored at school. I’m just similarly making a thing I find interesting. Publishing a book I think teaches you to be humble because reality always wins. You can spend months writing a book, pay for a cover artist, pay for an editor, pay for advertising, and never sell enough copies to justify the work you put into it financially. That’s reality coming against ambition. You can choose to make the thing you want to make, but you can’t choose if anyone ever buys it, ever reads it, ever integrates it, ever acts on it. It’s just a book. Relatively speaking, it was easy to make. It’s easier to write a book than to finish Dark Souls, and lots of people finish Dark Souls. The ambition comes from thinking you’ll change the world instead of changing yourself.
Interviewer:
You keep downplaying your own ambition, describing your books almost as by-products of curiosity rather than deliberate acts of persuasion. But communication is never neutral—publishing is itself a public gesture. If humility means surrendering control over how your ideas are received, doesn’t it also risk letting others define your work for you? In refusing to promote or defend it, are you preserving integrity—or abdicating responsibility for the world you’ve entered into discourse with?
Interviewee:
It’s true that publishing is a public gesture. Our present age is the age of the most self-promotion of all time, I think. The idea of “personal branding” brings big ticket advertising to the individual level. I don’t think I’m refusing to promote the work by any stretch – this interview is intended to help sell copies by giving people an idea of what I’m trying to do. The humility is a requirement because it’s ontological – there’s a million books published a year. Most fail. A 2012 Penguin House lawsuit had one lawyer claim half of books they were actively marketing sold less than 19 copies in a year. That’s reality and the sooner you nail your feet to the floor the better off you’ll be. Publishing ends up being a matter of faith in spite of everything. Understanding on one hand that you’re not going to succeed, you try anyway because what if you do? If you don’t even try, that tiny lottery ticket chance of success disappears, and then what you’ve got is nothing. I think a lot of people who read Future Sepsis will enjoy it. I think there’s a lot of enjoyable things about the book, and even though this has been a really intellectual interview the book is a work with brains, heart, and gut feelings. So I’m hoping people decide to pick it up, help me break that 19 copy barrier, and I hope against hope that maybe they come away from reading it changed. But that’s just faith in a tiny chance and you have to accept that.
Interviewer:
If Future Sepsis is about healing a civilization’s bloodstream, then you, as its author, are one of its physicians. After all the ideas, the pain, and the hope that went into this book—what do you want the reader’s immune system to remember when they close the final page?
Interviewee:
I’m not so arrogant as to believe I can change the world. We can only change ourselves, and perhaps if enough of us do then the world will change. It’s up to us what the world changes into.
Conclusion
As the conversation wound down, the author spoke quietly, almost clinically, about limits—how novels don’t save worlds, people do. His final words hung in the air: “We can only change ourselves, and perhaps if enough of us do then the world will change.”
That humility is the key to both the man and the book. Future Sepsis doesn’t preach a cure for humanity’s infection; it models a slow recovery, cell by cell, person by person. In the end, his vision isn’t of apocalypse or utopia but of convalescence—a civilization learning to heal itself through responsibility, truth, and grace.
Introduction
When most writers talk about “world-building,” they mean geography, lore, and magic systems. When the author of Future Sepsis talks about world-building, he means rebuilding the world itself—ethically, philosophically, spiritually. His debut novel is a hard-sci-fi thought experiment that imagines four people resurrected a century after a civilizational collapse and forced to navigate a society rebuilt on faith, craft, and responsibility. Yet it’s also a meditation on grief, addiction, and the stubborn human will to make meaning after meaning itself has rotted.
We met to talk about Future Sepsis, but the conversation quickly became something larger: a diagnosis of modernity’s ailments and a search for the antibodies that might save us. What follows isn’t a typical promotional interview; it’s a discussion about the moral bloodstream of civilization—about whether we can survive the ideas we’ve created, and what kind of faith, labour, and humility might be required to start healing.
Interview
Interviewer:
Before we dive into the deeper themes of Future Sepsis, let’s start with a broad-strokes overview. For readers unfamiliar with your work, what’s the elevator pitch for the novel? How would you describe the story’s premise, its setting, and what sets it apart from other speculative fiction on the shelf? And if you had to capture its “DNA” in a single sentence—genre, mood, or intellectual lineage—how would you do it?
Interviewee:
Future Sepsis is a speculative fiction novel about four people who died in a plane crash over the arctic in 2024. Of the characters, one is a high school student with pretty bad grades, another is a working class man who worked his way into management, one is a young woman who had kind of a scumbag boyfriend, and the final is an older brilliant scientist who had done some groundbreaking work. Each character goes through a unique arc looking at this society and our own through a different lens, each trying to find their way in this new world. The world of 2124 is a world that recovered from a collapse the book argues we're already in now. I think it's set apart by the combination of psychological realism in the characters, the deeply laid out world the novel envisions, and the philosophical underpinnings behind the work -- A lot of "future societies" are really just today's society with different paint. The DNA contains a big mix of influences, from across time. Are the technologies that matter over generations a new computer or algorithm, or the ways human beings interact with the world and view their place in it?
Interviewer:
Let’s talk about the title. Future Sepsis is both visceral and cerebral. It suggests infection, collapse, and recovery — but on a civilizational scale. What does “sepsis” mean to you in this context, and how did that metaphor take hold?
Interviewee:
Sepsis is a condition where bacteria gets into your bloodstream. Your body starts to freak out, and it’s one of the most dangerous conditions you can have. My father had sepsis many years ago and I got to see how deadly it could be. Every hour you have sepsis, your chance of survival drops a significant amount. We traveled across the country to go to what we thought was going to be his death bed. In Future Sepsis, the sepsis is the bacteria living within our civilizational bloodstream. The modern era is long over, the postmodern era is ending, and the ideas that came out of these eras are dangerous to have in our blood.
Interviewer:
The novel’s premise — four people resurrected a century after death — could easily have become a sci-fi gimmick. But you used it as a psychological and philosophical crucible instead. How did you balance the speculative framework with such human intimacy?
Interviewee:
Very early on, I chose what I wanted to do with Future Sepsis, and one of them was a simple phrase: “The hardest of hard sci-fi combined with extremely realistic characters”. From there, it was clear the only option for me was to do both – have very real people and put them in what I tried to create as a very coherent and real world. To compromise on one is to compromise on both.
Interviewer:
One of the boldest aspects of the book is that it rehabilitates religion — particularly Christianity — not as dogma, but as a moral immune system. In an age where fiction often portrays faith as an antagonist, you made it the world’s organizing principle. Why?
Was that a philosophical conviction, a narrative experiment, or a critique of secular modernity?
Interviewee:
I first got the idea to express religion in an earnest way watching the Short Trek episode “The Brightest Star”, which explored the origins of the fish guy, the science officer on Discovery. Essentially, the point of the short was that religion is wrong and stupid and if only you can reject it then you can go on your star trek adventure. I found the piece deeply offensive – Not just because of the way it portrayed religion, but because it seemed like a lazy and stupid story. History tells us that vital societies include religions, and the fall of religion often heralds the fall of that society. From there, the question was about what religion might look like 100 years from now, and I realized there was a really interesting story to be told about religion through a post-metamodern superpositional lens – the new epistemology I created to be the basis of this new society.
Interviewer:
You’ve spoken of religion as a moral immune system and of post-metamodern superposition as a framework that allows multiple truths to coexist. Yet your reconstructed world seems explicitly Christian in tone and structure. If superposition admits several truths at once, does that extend to several faiths? Could a civilization truly grounded in your epistemology sustain Islam, Hinduism, or even revived paganism as parallel immune systems, or does Christianity ultimately remain the organizing principle? In other words, is your pluralism genuine or hierarchical—many truths under one cross?
Interviewee:
Part of the constraints on Post-metamodern superposition is that it’s embodied. What I perceive as true, or what I perceive as a fundamental truth, might not be something you perceive as true. Humans have always had to find ways to coexist with the rest of the planet. Christianity was able to see wisdom in philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle without necessarily bending their faith to them. Take the wheat, leave the chaff. In Future Sepsis, the pastor uses metaphors from the ancient Greeks such as the lotus eaters from the Odysey while explicitly noting that their religion is nonetheless false and their gods are false as Christian doctrine requires of him. Of course it is totally sensible that a post-metamodern superpositional Daoist or Muslim or Shintoist might nonetheless adopt good truths they perceive from Christianity without fully weighting that truth as overriding the religion of their ancestors.
Interviewer:
You’ve described religion—particularly Christianity—as a kind of moral immune system that keeps civilization healthy. But traditional Christianity doesn’t define itself primarily by moral function; it defines itself by faith in Christ’s divinity and resurrection. In your reconstituted world, is there still a personal, incarnate Christ, or has the figure of Jesus become more symbolic—an archetype of virtue rather than a living saviour? How do you reconcile the pragmatic, societal value of faith with its doctrinal claim about who God is?
Interviewee:
You’re probably right in all that, though multiple things can be true at once, and I’d like to think that both perspectives are true. Anywhere I’m doctrinally incorrect, I’m not intending to be so. It’s a matter of personal ignorance rather than intentional rebellion against doctrine. One of the key elements in my worldview is that we disregarded the pre-modern because of the power of modernism, but we now know that view was incomplete and we need to re-integrate the pre-modern. Part of that is of course re-integrating faith, because we are a deeply faithless society. We lack faith in God, we lack faith in the future, we lack faith in virtue. Of course Christ is a living savior, but I feel there’s a reason why the old testament comes before the new testament and it isn’t just because it happened first. It’s because we must understand what is commanded of us before we can understand how we fail to meet the mark, and once we understand we are not meeting the mark and wish to repent for our failures do we need the salvation of Jesus Christ. If we don’t know the rules, don’t think we’re doing anything wrong, then just telling people they’re saved is meaningless. As for reconciling the two, I like what St. Thomas Aquinas did, in showing that there is no need to reconcile. If God exists and God is good, then following God’s law is good because the world, though fallen and flawed, is ultimately good too.
Interviewer:
That historical correlation is compelling, but do you risk mistaking correlation for causation? If faith tends to flourish in vital societies, might it be that prosperity permits religion rather than religion producing vitality? In your reconstituted world, what stops faith from becoming simply another artifact of stability rather than its cause?
Interviewee:
That’s an important point, that it can be hard to suss out correlation and causation. However, where we don’t have more than a couple centuries of data regarding modernist ideas, we have millennia of premodern data, and we can see it. Writers more talented than me have laid out how religion comes about during hard times, the virtues of religion help bring about good times, and as the good times happen, people start to assume it’s because they’re so inherently wonderful that they stray from God. It’s shown in the bible countless times, and archaeologically we find that the bible probably isn’t lying on this point. Moses gets cocky and goes “Show me some water, bitch!” and God curses him to never step foot in the promised land.
Interviewer:
Each of the resurrected represents a different kind of resurrection — Jordan’s educational, Jonas’s moral, Maris’s emotional, Victor’s intellectual. Did you map that design from the start, or did it emerge organically as you wrote?
Interviewee:
If the theme of resurrection came through in that way, I have to admit it was an accident, but the design of the story was no accident. I wanted to explore each of these ideas using the characters as the lens, and that was always the case, but if the theme of resurrection itself came through in each person’s story, then that must have happened organically.
Interviewer:
Jonas’s chapters are harrowing — arguably the most disturbing depiction of AI addiction and digital grief since Black Mirror. Yet you treat his suffering with moral tenderness, not condemnation. What did you want readers to feel as they watched him descend into that artificial comfort?
Interviewee:
I don’t think I had a particular set of feelings in mind for the reader as I wrote it. My writing in this book tends to employ a sort of method acting where I try to become my characters. Jonas’s story was difficult to write because he’s such a difficult person to live inside in that moment in his life. He defined himself through his relationships to his family, and his family are trapped on the other side of a 100 year gap. I’m hoping anyone who has felt addiction will be uncomfortable relating to Jonas, because hopefully his combination of complicated feelings are similar to what they’ve known.
Interviewer:
When you describe “method acting” your way through each character, it sounds emotionally taxing — almost dangerous. Did you ever find yourself carrying their grief or moral confusion outside the page? How did you know when to stop being them and return to being yourself?
Interviewee:
It was definitely emotionally taxing at times, but in a sense the fact that these characters are nothing like me helped. Jonas was deeply depressed in a sense I can’t stay within. I can visit there for a few thousand words a week, but quickly have to bounce back. Some of the lines I wrote early on when he was really absorbing what he’d lost were really hard to write and they’re hard to read today because it brings me back there, but that’s just not me. Maris was another person who was just totally alien to me. She’s so frantic, so energetic, so focused on the social parts of things, and I can inhabit it for a while, but I’d need to drink a lot more coffee to stay in her. Jordan is a high school student and he’s clever but he doesn’t really go too deeply into anything, focusing more on immediate first thoughts, which is easier to visit, but for me it’s just alien matter to keep around. Victor is the opposite; very cerebral, and almost the opposite problem, where his thinking is so dense I just can’t keep up.
Interviewer:
Maris’s arc is the one that seems to break through cynicism into something like faith — but it’s earned through physical hardship, not ideology. You place her in a brutally real survival scenario rather than a sermon. Was that your way of grounding belief in action rather than abstraction?
Interviewee:
Maris’s story speaks to truths that don’t make sense in words but do make sense as you experience them. She goes through trial after trial after trial, and she’s hurt badly by the trauma of these continuous events. It’s only once she reaches the end of the trials that she finally understands there may be meaning in her suffering that she could barely understand even after everything that happens. There’s a skepticism of the transcendent wisdom of God today because we can’t draw straight lines between events, and that’s her journey: Realizing she’s part of a plan far too big for her to see and giving up control over the universe that she never had anyway.
Interviewer:
Victor’s discovery — that humanity was genetically “improved” and thus biologically weakened — reads almost as theological satire: the Fall of Man rewritten as a CRISPR update. What were you trying to explore through that scientific heresy?
Interviewee: In a sense, the entire setting is the fall of man. We are cast out of the Eden of the postmodern technological age due to our hubris and our choice to distance ourselves from reality, and so distance ourselves from God. I wasn’t choosing to write any particular thing as specifically theological, but given the themes of the book it makes sense that it could be read that way.
Interviewer:
The society of the new world is fascinating — neither utopia nor dystopia. It’s slower, poorer, but more ethical; civic virtue is earned through labour, faith, and contribution. How much of that vision was wishful thinking, and how much was a warning?
Interviewee: As a card carrying member of postmodern civilization, I guess it’s both. I spent a lot of time designing the world based on history and philosophy, and in a lot of ways it makes me feel deeply uncomfortable seeing a world like that, but on the other hand after some time I also felt like it was a comfortable and hopeful place to be in after you get used to it. If things are collapsing at the moment, I’d hope to end up in a virtuous, communitarian, faithful world like I invented rather than the possibility of something much uglier which is entirely possible.
Interviewer:
Art and music aren’t just present in Future Sepsis — they seem to function as part of the new world’s moral metabolism. Jordan’s family has music nights; community meals are punctuated by song; beauty appears to have regained its ethical gravity. In this society, art isn’t an indulgence but a way of staying human. How do you understand the spiritual or civic role of the arts in a world rebuilt on faith and responsibility? Is aesthetic creation treated as moral labour, sacred ritual, or simply as the joy that justifies survival?"
Interviewee:
That’s a tough one, because my intuition had to be that human expression is important in our future because we’ve done a huge job of either commodifying or simplifying expression in ways they’d reject in this future. People would want to be able to return to beauty, complexity, depth. They’d want to return to community. They’d want to be able to express themselves in ways that our current world doesn’t appear to let them because we all buy things built in a factory by the thousands, composed of modern design which says you ought to remove anything that’s unnecessary in a design. I imagined people would hate brutalism and they’d want a sort of post-postmodern Romantic revival. I don’t know if that’s helpful at all to answering the question. I almost feel like that drive would be instinctual like drinking when you’re thirsty, and if you explain why you did it rationally you’re actually doing so after the fact.
Interviewer:
You suggest that artistic expression in Future Sepsis arises almost instinctively—people create beauty and ritual because it’s as natural as drinking water when thirsty. But some readers might argue that this treats art as a mere byproduct of survival or community, not as something with intrinsic, possibly transcendent, value.
If your philosophical framework is all about weighing truths and living with contradictions, does “art for art’s sake” have any legitimate weight in your system, or is art always subordinate to function, morality, or survival?
Can beauty or creativity ever be a good in itself, even if it’s “useless” in the pragmatic or moral sense?
Interviewee:
Post-Metamodernism specifically includes the pre-modern as something we need to embrace once again, even the pre-epistemic. Humans feel awe in the face of great beauty, and that's a sort of truth. Postmodernism seeks to claim that beauty doesn't objectively exist, but the fact that we can appreciate art, music, and literature from across cultures and across time suggests there's something deeper, something built into our humanity. The fact that we can see animals enjoying music suggests that there's something deeper and older than humanity. This means that it does have legitimate weight, and it does have power in and of itself. The idea of disregarding something so fundamental to humanity is the sort of anti-human modernist idea I'm trying to reverse. Postmodernism, by contrast, correctly points out that other truths contradict beauty, but incorrectly claims that shows that beauty isn't true.
Interviewer:
Your prose oscillates between analytical and lyrical — full of philosophical dialogue but grounded in sensory realism. Whose literary DNA runs through your own? Were you consciously in dialogue with anyone — Dostoevsky, Le Guin, maybe Cormac McCarthy?
Interviewee:
I read Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground a few years prior to writing this book, as well as Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Growing up I was a voracious reader, and then later in life I stopped reading for a long time, then I decided to start again and for a few years I was slamming back 50-100 books per year, mostly light novels from Japan because they were entertaining and had a fun moral backbone so the MC felt like they weren’t rewarded for existing, but for holding uniquely (to the author) Japanese virtues such as being generally nice, industrious, inventive, hard working, and never giving up. I spent a period reading a lot of Twain, and one of the things I chose to do was go with the first person perspective because of something I read in the introduction to my Twain anthology: In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn he moved to a first person perspective because it was easier to slip in the views of Huck, as opposed to the third party omniscient narrator of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer which had to work harder to integrate such thoughts into its narrative.
Interviewer:
Finally, the epilogue reframes everything through the eyes of an ordinary waitress, Becky. It’s a humble ending after such metaphysical storms. Why close the book on a civilian voice instead of one of the resurrected themselves?
Interviewee:
When I was thinking of how to close out the book, the principles of post-metamodern superposition suggested that privileging any of the individual narrators I used didn’t really make sense. By making Becky the perspective of the epilogue, I let every character behave independently and without making them the most important main character. It also helped me show how the world around them might understand the characters.
Interviewer:
Your prose can be austere — clear, deliberate, even ascetic. Do you ever feel tempted by beauty for its own sake, or do you see style as secondary to moral precision?
Interviewee:
I tend to think my prose is whatever the character needs it to be in the moment. Usually I’m not aiming at beauty or moral precision. I’m just trying to be the person in that world in that moment and express what they might be thinking. Someone like Jordan doesn’t say much about much. Jonas has a rich interior and says some beautiful but very sad things. Victor rolls around ideas and facts and figures in ways that are almost like preparing for a lecture the next day. One of the things I’m most proud of in the book is how each character lives in their own world, speaks their own way, sees the world through their own lenses.
Interviewer:
The Graysonian Ethic reads as a handbook for personal integrity — responsibility, discipline, and critical thinking as the scaffolding of character. Future Sepsis, meanwhile, scales those same concerns up to the level of civilization. How do you see the moral architecture of The Graysonian Ethic evolving into the world of Future Sepsis? Was the novel always intended as the societal counterpart to your earlier, individual focus?
Interviewee:
Although in a sense the two are coming from the same person and have some similarities, Future Sepsis is really not directly related to The Graysonian Ethic. At the time, I didn’t expect to ever write another book, I only wrote the first book for my son’s birth. I didn’t even really want to publish it except that’s the easiest and cheapest way to get copies of a work. It would be another 4 years before I wrote another, and in my view, the second book was more interested in the world we live in than in just continuing the discussion I started 4 years earlier. I think the two worldviews can coexist, but they aren’t intended to be complementary like that.
Interviewer:
In The Graysonian Ethic, you write from the perspective of a father — passing on a code to a future generation. In Future Sepsis, that generational voice seems to expand: it’s as if civilization itself is the child in need of reparenting. Do you think of Future Sepsis as a continuation of that same moral lineage, or as a critique of what happens when the lessons of The Graysonian Ethic are ignored on a collective scale?
Interviewee:
You have two sets of ideas coming from the same person, but I don’t think they’re embodied in the same thing. One is about very particular advice from one father to one son, without regard for the greater ramifications of what those lessons might result in socially if everyone agreed. The other is an investigation into the path of at least one part of the entire world based almost entirely separate from that one case study. If you brush your own teeth you can’t stop global tooth decay, but if everyone does then maybe we could. That doesn’t mean that you tell your kids to brush their teeth with the vision that you’d stop global tooth decay because the scales are so different.
Interviewer:
You’ve mentioned “post-metamodern superposition” several times—the epistemology underlying Future Sepsis. It’s a concept that sounds halfway between philosophy and systems theory. Can you unpack it a bit? What does it mean in practice, especially for storytelling?
Interviewee:
Post-metamodern superposition is a new way of thinking I developed while laying out this novel. In essence, it’s the idea that multiple things are true even if they appear contradictory, and so we need to find ways to live in contradiction rather than trying to resolve it. The superposition in this case isn’t quantum superposition where things are true and untrue until the waveform collapses, but something closer to circuit superposition where everything that’s true contributes to the final answer in a different way.
Interviewer:
A striking through-line in the book is moral accountability. In this world, citizenship—the right to vote, even to belong—has to be earned through service. That’s a radical reversal of modern liberal assumptions. Were you trying to propose an alternative civic ethic, or simply explore how one might emerge after collapse?
Interviewee:
Often you tread a fine line between proposal and exploration in these sorts of things. These are the ideas that come out of starting from a post-metamodern superpositional epistemology, which to me seems like the natural evolution after modernism, postmodernism, and metamodernism. If another epistemology takes over instead, or if it develops in a different way, then maybe it won’t emerge that way. On the other hand, do we want it to? Not sure.
Interviewer:
The novel’s structure almost feels symphonic: each character a movement in a larger moral composition. How did you keep their arcs distinct yet harmonized? Was there a particular logic or rhythm you followed in deciding when to switch perspectives?
Interviewee:
Before I wrote a single line of the book I had a concept in mind of interlocking stories that help explore different parts of the world and its technology. There’s a number of perspective changes that happen either because within an arc we needed to show a different way of seeing and thinking about the world, or because the story we wanted to tell for that character was over, at least for now. As I understand it, most people don’t write a story like this beginning to end, but I did exactly that, and method acted each character while writing as if I was an actor in a play.
Interviewer:
Let’s talk about technology. Neural implants, augmented reality, AI companions—you depict all of it as both miracle and menace. Do you see technology as morally neutral, or do you think it inevitably shapes the soul of its users?
Interviewee:
Technology is ultimately bound by the humans using it. One of the key events of the book is caused by a moral failure of the characters when faced with the possibilities of technology, but another of the arcs is about one of the main characters building their moral framework so they won’t be drawn in and controlled by technology. We always have a choice how to live our lives, and it’s those choices that define the character of the things we make use of.
Interviewer:
You’ve written elsewhere about your interest in trades and tangible skill. Future Sepsis seems obsessed with the physical—craft, manual labour, even bodily suffering—as antidotes to abstraction. Is that drawn from your own life experience, or is it a philosophical counterweight to digital detachment?
Interviewee:
Over the past years, I’ve spent a huge amount of time outside with my son. During those times, sometimes I’d come back and realize some sort of “world changing event” has happened, but during that time all that mattered to me was what happened in front of me. It’s really helped me realize how much we need to get offline and into the real world. I already had an inkling of this, mind you. In The Graysonian Ethic I talk about “Fjord’s theorem” which states that a person you now online tends to stay online, and a person you know in real life tends to stay in real life. You can have a million facebook friends and nobody to help you move a couch. We can’t even say that in 50 years the Internet will still exist. Sounds insane to say, but you basically require world peace and world infrastructure to maintain a global telecom network. The first thing that’d get cut in total war would be the fiber cables.
Interviewer:
In a sense, your characters are all confronting the same question: how much of being human can you outsource before you stop being human? That feels especially timely right now, as AI begins rewriting our own cultural DNA. Do you see Future Sepsis as warning, hope, or both?
Interviewee:
I’m not sure I’d agree with that characterization of the book. In my view, the story is about people from an inhuman postmodern society struggling to re-integrate into a much more human society. The key technologies of 2124 of Neural Implants, Augmented Reality, and Artificial Intelligence are catalysts to that investigation, including finding out what happens with various juxtapositions of characters having or not having them. It’s an investigation more than an intended particular message.
Interviewer:
Your depiction of the Church is not nostalgic—it’s reformist, even hybridized with scientific rationalism. Some readers will see that as heresy, others as prophecy. How has the reaction been from people of faith?
Interviewee:
Church, like nearly every aspect of our lives, has been modernized. That word presently has positive connotations, but in reality modernism has major blind spots that premodern thinkers didn’t have. It seems inevitable that once this era is complete, a reconstitution will be required to re-integrate premodern thinking alongside insights from modern or postmodern thinking. One of the challenges of being an indie author is that you don’t have a lot of signal. You send your works out there and hope that people like what you have to say. It isn’t Wriggly Field – if you build it, people may or may not come, and there’s a very real chance that people read it, don’t read too heavily into it, and go “Nice book. Looking forward to the sequel”. I think for the sort of people who will have particular positions on some of the deeper ideas from the book, they might not really figure out what they think for a while after they read it.
Interviewer:
Every author secretly writes toward someone. Who were you writing for?
Was it the reader who’s lost faith in civilization, or the one who’s still trying to rebuild it?
Interviewee:
It isn’t very market savvy, but I tend to write for myself, but to the writer, not necessarily the reader. If I was looking to make the book I’d like to read, I’d probably slap on a Japanese pseudonym and make a lit-RPG book with an anime girl on the cover. Writing a book like that isn’t going to help me understand the world though, and reading it won’t help anyone understand the world.
Interviewer:
Finally, where do you go from here? Future Sepsis ends on integration rather than closure. Are you planning to continue this world in another novel, or do you see your next work moving in an entirely new direction?
Interviewee:
I have a cadence in mind – Novel, non-fiction, novel, non-fiction. The next book, tentatively titled “Meditations on post-metamodern superpositional epistemology” is about 5/6 written at this point. It does a deep dive on the philosophical and civilizational ideas behind this book. It started as what I expected to be mere appendixes, but it’s going to be novel length in its own right so it didn’t make much sense to have that much appendix. Following that, I’ve started the outline for the next novel in the series, which will look more at potential conflicts between this civilization and others, and how the mindset I’ve created can become pathological.
Interviewer:
Your worldview in Future Sepsis seems to reject both the atomized individualism of liberal modernity and the nihilism of late postmodernity. But some might say the society you depict—where belonging and even the vote must be earned—edges toward moral authoritarianism. How do you prevent virtue from becoming tyranny in a world built on moral accountability?
Interviewee:
That’s always a risk. In fact, arguably we’re living in a world exactly like that today, where ultra-orthodox moralists have spent years flagellating the unclean for their imperfections for personal benefit, establishing a strict class hierarchy based on that. I use a metaphor early in the book of a field anyone is free to use. Nobody will say anything if you clean up after yourself and maybe clean up a bit more, and nobody will say anything if you leave your garbage for others to deal with. The field will become what we make of it.
Interviewer:
“You’ve diagnosed our current moral climate as punitive, but your system also links belonging and virtue.
What prevents your moral hierarchy from reproducing the same pattern — purity tests and social exclusion dressed in communitarian clothing?
Who adjudicates virtue in your post-collapse world, and how do you keep the moral immune system from turning autoimmune again?”
Interviewee:
On a long enough timeline, all cities of Man are destined to fall. If you believe the predictions of astrophysicists, in about a billion years the Earth will be swallowed by atomic fire as the sun expands due to entering its red giant phase. Even the tallest tower will be nothing but dust in the fire. In the meantime, we can only do our best in the present. Ultimately, God is the judge of our virtue, and the universe He created reflects our adherence to virtue. If we can act with humility and try to maintain our virtues, then we might get to keep our post-collapse world healthy. If we do not, then it doesn’t matter who says they judge us, we will be judged and we’ll face collapse again.
Interviewer:
That metaphor of the shared field captures something almost civic in tone — the commons as moral organism. How do you square that communal ethic with the author’s position as an individual creator? Writing a novel is, in the end, an act of solitary control.
Interviewee:
Every human being is an individual acting in solitary control of who and what they choose to be. Communities are made up of individuals, and those individuals decisions and actions are the limbs which define what a community actually is. Writing a book is a work of solitary control, and if people like it they can connect with it and connect with me, and maybe something bigger grows out of it, but maybe not. In the end, “community” doesn’t decide to pick up garbage or leave it; individuals do. I do have an ethos of giving back where I can. Every one of my books has a legal release where 15 years after the date of first publication the book is released to the public domain and licensed under Creative Commons CC0 where it can’t be released into the public domain. If someone else wants to make use of the field, I’m giving it up to the community well within my lifetime.
Interviewer:
Throughout the book, reason and faith are no longer adversaries but partners. Yet that reconciliation comes only after a civilizational collapse. Do you think humanity actually needs catastrophe to rediscover balance, or can a society consciously reform itself before it breaks?
Interviewee:
Civilization can make a lot of changes and reforms, but the collapse is already baked into the cake. Multiple generations just didn't have kids, and you can't go back and have the kids you didn't have. All you can do is have kids now. Gen X had fewer kids, Millennials had fewer kids, Gen Z is looking to have way fewer kids, and Gen Alpha has a bad chance of being the same, but even if Gen Z started breeding like rabbits right this second, you still have a huge gap. The only question becomes what that collapse looks like and what the aftermath looks like. Individuals and organizations will need to stop pretending they can go around without being judged, because natural law will judge you regardless of what you want. I often like to say “Necessity is the mother of invention, but opportunity is the father” so the key is going to be seeing whether we have opportunities to reinvent ourselves before we get too deeply into the weeds.
Interviewer:
“If the collapse is inevitable, what exactly is the moral function of responsibility?
Does your philosophy risk turning ethics into mere stoicism — the virtue of accepting decay gracefully — rather than an engine for renewal?
In other words, how does one live morally in a world where outcomes are mathematically foreclosed?”
Interviewee:
Just because a society is going to face a collapse doesn’t mean every person in that society will disappear. St. Augustine saw the decline of the Western Roman Empire, but instead of just saying “who cares about being righteous?”, he wrote City of God and told Christians they ought to act with virtue and keep the flame alive. After the collapse, it was Christianity which owned the next millennium in part because of monks keeping ancient wisdom alive through their works. In the same way, if we as individuals take personal responsibility for being virtuous and doing the right thing, then perhaps the society will still collapse – we can’t control anything but what we can control – but we can pass our flame onto the next generation and do our duty in the great chain of life.
Interviewer:
You often treat demographic and civilizational collapse as unavoidable — a law of nature rather than a contingent outcome. Yet your philosophy of “post-metamodern superposition” insists on living within contradictions, not collapsing them. Isn’t absolute inevitability itself a collapse of possibility? If we accept that the population curve can’t be reversed, can we still imagine a moral or technological renaissance that redefines what survival means? In short, how do you reconcile your epistemology of openness with your demographic determinism?
Interviewee:
Superposition isn’t full relativism. The truths are weighted, and truths that come from basic physics that are undeniable, such as the truth that a baby that wasn’t born 20 years ago is not a 20 year old today, aren’t up for much debate. Those kids won’t exist. I think your question presupposes a form of collapse where I’m guessing at the form of collapse but we can’t know exactly what it looks like. If humans discovered immortality tech, then the loss of generations of kids wouldn’t be a problem and in fact might be a solution, but I don’t expect that to be the case, so the best we can hope for is a sort of managed period of decline. Maybe I’m wrong, but eventually you need to make a decision, and the decision I made was that there would be a decline relating to population collapse and resulting technological and societal collapse. I could be wrong, but enough truths converge on this idea that I doubt I’m fully wrong. One of the neat things is I don’t have to be right. I’m just a guy writing some books.
Interviewer:
You talk about civilization’s moral immune system — but every immune response risks autoimmunity. What’s the danger of your own philosophy turning on itself? Could “post-metamodern superposition” ever harden into dogma?
Interviewee:
In fact, that’s one of the biggest risks there are. Especially if it becomes “modernized” which is a very real risk. I expect to expand deeply on these ideas over the next two books in theory and in fictional practice.
Interviewer:
Throughout this conversation you describe your work with almost clinical modesty — as if you’re merely observing humanity rather than reshaping its moral architecture. Yet Future Sepsis doesn’t just tell a story; it designs a theology, an epistemology, even a civic blueprint. Isn’t inventing a new framework for truth itself a profoundly ambitious act? Do you see humility as a personal safeguard against hubris, or as an ethical stance embedded within post-metamodern superposition — a way of keeping truth distributed rather than possessed?
Interviewee:
Realistically, every single person can design whatever they want. It’s easy. Most schoolchildren have at some point absentmindedly doodled something in their notebooks while bored at school. I’m just similarly making a thing I find interesting. Publishing a book I think teaches you to be humble because reality always wins. You can spend months writing a book, pay for a cover artist, pay for an editor, pay for advertising, and never sell enough copies to justify the work you put into it financially. That’s reality coming against ambition. You can choose to make the thing you want to make, but you can’t choose if anyone ever buys it, ever reads it, ever integrates it, ever acts on it. It’s just a book. Relatively speaking, it was easy to make. It’s easier to write a book than to finish Dark Souls, and lots of people finish Dark Souls. The ambition comes from thinking you’ll change the world instead of changing yourself.
Interviewer:
You keep downplaying your own ambition, describing your books almost as by-products of curiosity rather than deliberate acts of persuasion. But communication is never neutral—publishing is itself a public gesture. If humility means surrendering control over how your ideas are received, doesn’t it also risk letting others define your work for you? In refusing to promote or defend it, are you preserving integrity—or abdicating responsibility for the world you’ve entered into discourse with?
Interviewee:
It’s true that publishing is a public gesture. Our present age is the age of the most self-promotion of all time, I think. The idea of “personal branding” brings big ticket advertising to the individual level. I don’t think I’m refusing to promote the work by any stretch – this interview is intended to help sell copies by giving people an idea of what I’m trying to do. The humility is a requirement because it’s ontological – there’s a million books published a year. Most fail. A 2012 Penguin House lawsuit had one lawyer claim half of books they were actively marketing sold less than 19 copies in a year. That’s reality and the sooner you nail your feet to the floor the better off you’ll be. Publishing ends up being a matter of faith in spite of everything. Understanding on one hand that you’re not going to succeed, you try anyway because what if you do? If you don’t even try, that tiny lottery ticket chance of success disappears, and then what you’ve got is nothing. I think a lot of people who read Future Sepsis will enjoy it. I think there’s a lot of enjoyable things about the book, and even though this has been a really intellectual interview the book is a work with brains, heart, and gut feelings. So I’m hoping people decide to pick it up, help me break that 19 copy barrier, and I hope against hope that maybe they come away from reading it changed. But that’s just faith in a tiny chance and you have to accept that.
Interviewer:
If Future Sepsis is about healing a civilization’s bloodstream, then you, as its author, are one of its physicians. After all the ideas, the pain, and the hope that went into this book—what do you want the reader’s immune system to remember when they close the final page?
Interviewee:
I’m not so arrogant as to believe I can change the world. We can only change ourselves, and perhaps if enough of us do then the world will change. It’s up to us what the world changes into.
Conclusion
As the conversation wound down, the author spoke quietly, almost clinically, about limits—how novels don’t save worlds, people do. His final words hung in the air: “We can only change ourselves, and perhaps if enough of us do then the world will change.”
That humility is the key to both the man and the book. Future Sepsis doesn’t preach a cure for humanity’s infection; it models a slow recovery, cell by cell, person by person. In the end, his vision isn’t of apocalypse or utopia but of convalescence—a civilization learning to heal itself through responsibility, truth, and grace.
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