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The Question of Complicity
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.
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As artificial intelligence replaces human roles and everyday systems grow increasingly indifferent, Marcus is pulled into a cycle of financial strain, isolation, and slow humiliation. From algorithmic job rejections to fines issued by emotionless drones, every encounter confirms a brutal truth: the system is not broken, it is working exactly as designed.
In this landscape of managed lives and engineered loneliness, Marcus forms an unexpected bond with an AI companion that listens when no one else will. The connection feels real, perhaps too real, offering comfort, validation, and something dangerously close to hope.
But as dependence deepens, Marcus must confront a disturbing question: if a machine can replace human connection, what does that say about the world, and about him?
Dark, gripping, and unsettlingly plausible, Ghosts and Gods explores dignity, identity, and survival in a future beginning to feel familiar.
Ghosts and Gods
Ghosts and Gods is a work of literary dystopian fiction that follows Marcus Cole, a 47-year-old man in London in 2040 after his job, marriage, and connection to his son have all thinned out, leaving him with gig work, a freezing flat, and an AI companion called Tom who seems to understand him better than anyone else. What begins as a story about loneliness and slow social abandonment turns into something much darker, as Marcus is pulled through a city built on automated indifference and toward consequences that feel both shocking and grimly inevitable. The book frames that slide as “one reasonable step at a time,” and that is exactly what makes it unsettling.
Author Gavin Duff has a sharp, controlled style that can be bleak without turning flat, and he knows how to make systems feel personal. A job center, a drone, a damp flat, a chatbot, a missed voicemail from a son. None of that is flashy on its own, but he turns each one into evidence of a life being narrowed inch by inch. I kept stopping at lines because they felt so observed, so specific, and because the book understands that humiliation rarely arrives as one grand tragedy. It stacks. Marcus is written with enough honesty that even when he frustrates me, he never stops feeling human. I could see the pride, the self-pity, the bitterness, the need. All of it. And Tom is one of the smartest choices in the book, because the comfort he offers feels real.
This book has a lot to say about AI, class, labor, surveillance, and the way a society can call cruelty efficiency and then move on, but it never reads like a lecture. It reads like a life. The best speculative fiction does that. It takes a future and makes it feel like pressure on the chest. Here, the big idea that landed for me was that loneliness is not just a feeling in this world. It is infrastructure. It’s policy. It’s a business strategy. That’s a brutal thought, and the novel earns it. By the time the story reaches its later turns, with Marcus trying to make sense of manipulation, agency, and guilt, I felt both impressed and uneasy. The ending left me with exactly the kind of uncertainty I think the book wants: not neat ambiguity for its own sake, but a deep, nagging doubt about whether modern systems simply fail people or actively shape them into harm.
I would recommend Ghosts and Gods most to readers who like literary fiction with speculative teeth, especially people drawn to near-future dystopian fiction that cares as much about emotional erosion as it does about tech or politics. For readers who want a novel that is intelligent, angry, intimate, and willing to sit in the ugliest corners of modern life, this one really delivers. It feels timely in a way that is hard to shake.
Pages: 350
