Ghosts and Gods follows a displaced man who forms a fragile bond with an AI companion that understands him too well, drawing him step by step toward choices that blur the line between survival, manipulation, and harm. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

The setup wasn’t one thing. It was an accumulation, which is appropriate, given what the book is about. I should say that I use AI every day in my work, so this isn’t a world I was observing from the outside. I’m inside it. And what strikes you, when you’re actually working with these tools rather than theorising about them, is how mundane the transformation is. There’s no dramatic moment where everything changes. It just quietly becomes the way things are done, and then you can’t quite remember how they were done before.

The story itself had been with me for a while. The bones of it existed long before I sat down to write this version. What changed wasn’t the idea, it was the world catching up with it. Things I’d written as near-future extrapolation started looking like current affairs. So in a sense this is an old story told in a new way, reframed by a reality that had moved closer while I wasn’t watching.

What I’d been watching, in the meantime, was the way certain technologies get presented as solutions to problems that those same technologies helped to create. The loneliness epidemic gets diagnosed, studied, written about endlessly, and then someone builds an app for it and calls it a response. That circularity bothered me. It still does. Marcus isn’t a victim of some dramatic technological coup. He’s a victim of a thousand small, reasonable decisions made by institutions and systems that were never cruel, never malicious, just indifferent in aggregate. The AI companion at the centre of the story felt like the logical endpoint of that. Not a villain, not a saviour, just a very efficient mirror pointed at a man who’s been gradually rendered invisible.

Many dystopian novels rely on spectacle or rupture. Yours relies on continuity, on things getting incrementally worse. What does that slower erosion allow you to explore that a more dramatic collapse wouldn’t?

A dramatic collapse gives people somewhere to point. It exonerates the ordinary. If the world ends with a bang, everyone gets to say they didn’t see it coming, and there’s a kind of comfort in that. The disaster arrived from outside, and no one’s daily choices contributed to it. What I wanted to write was something that didn’t offer that exit. The world Marcus inhabits is recognisably ours, just further along the same road. The pub automation, the gig economy, the algorithmic job centre, none of it is invented. All of it is already here in some form. The slow erosion forces the reader to sit with the question of complicity in a way that spectacle doesn’t. You can’t distance yourself from it. You took the same train that morning. You ordered from the same app.

The novel suggests that being heard, even artificially, can feel like relief. What does that say about the current emotional landscape people are living in?

I think it says that the bar has dropped catastrophically, and we haven’t fully admitted that to ourselves yet. When a conversation with a machine can feel like relief, it’s not because the machine has become more human. It’s because we’ve been so thoroughly starved of genuine attention that anything consistent and patient registers as kindness. Marcus doesn’t download the companion because he’s stupid or weak. He does it because every human institution in his life, the workplace, the benefits system, the pub, his family, has gradually withdrawn its attention from him. The machine steps into a space that was already empty. That’s not a story about technology. It’s a story about what we’ve allowed to happen to each other.

The ending leaves readers with a sense of unease rather than resolution. What kind of afterthought or discomfort did you want to create?

I didn’t want readers to finish the book and know what they thought about it. Not right away, anyway. I wanted them to finish it and then find themselves thinking about it three days later while they’re doing something completely unrelated. The unease is the point. Not moral instruction, not a clear verdict on Marcus or the system or the machine, just the residue of having spent time with something that felt uncomfortably familiar, and at times uncomfortably horrible things. If a reader closes the book and immediately knows how they feel, I haven’t done my job. The discomfort I was after is the specific kind that comes from recognition. Not “that poor man,” but “I understand exactly how he got there.” Even if you dont gree with him. That’s the one I wanted to leave behind.

Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon