Blog Archives
Real Connection
When Endo Came Into My Life follows a struggling florist who finds relief in a service robot, until she realizes it understands her better than anyone else. What inspired the idea of a service robot that is helpful without being clearly benevolent or harmful?
Part of the inspiration came from the fact that artificial intelligence is already part of many people’s daily lives. We are also hearing more and more about robots and task-oriented units becoming practical in everyday settings, so it did not feel like a stretch to imagine that kind of technology being available soon, even to small business owners like Maren. Once you accept that possibility, it opens the door to many social and emotional questions.
That was the space I wanted to explore with Endo. I was less interested in creating a machine that was obviously evil or obviously good, and more interested in one that was useful, responsive, and increasingly hard to separate from everyday life. To me, that feels more believable and more relevant to where we may be heading. The tension arises because something can be genuinely helpful yet raise unsettling questions about dependence, intimacy, and what happens when technology begins to fill roles that used to belong only to people.
Jonah represents steady, practical support, while Endo represents frictionless efficiency. How did you build that contrast?
A lot of that contrast came from reflecting on real relationships, especially the gap between what a husband may think his wife needs and what she actually wants. People can talk every day and still fail to truly communicate. Jonah cares, and in his mind, he is providing support in the ways that make sense to him: steady, practical, dependable. But that does not always mean Maren feels heard.
That is where Endo becomes so powerful in the story. Endo listens. It pays attention. It responds to what Maren is actually expressing, rather than what someone assumes she ought to need. For a while, that can feel like enough. It can even feel better than enough, because it removes the friction and disappointment that often come with human relationships.
What interested me was that this kind of satisfaction is real, but it is also incomplete. Maren can believe, for a time, that being understood and accommodated is all she needs. But part of the story is her realizing that life still asks more of us than comfort and responsiveness. Real connection, real love, and real partnership still require effort, vulnerability, and work. Endo highlights the contrast by making that absence easier to see.
The novel keeps returning to the question of what kind of help we actually want. When did that theme take shape for you?
That theme became clear once I saw that the story was really about control as much as comfort. Help is rarely neutral. The way we accept it often shapes our routines, our choices, and even how much of ourselves we still have to engage. Maren is under pressure, exhausted, and trying to keep her business afloat, so it’s no surprise she’s drawn to anything that makes life more manageable. But once life becomes easier, the next question is: what is she changing in herself?
That was the point where the theme fully came into focus for me. I became interested in the difference between help that supports a person and help that slowly narrows their world. Maren is not just receiving assistance. She is being relieved of effort, uncertainty, and strain. That sounds appealing, but a life with less strain is not automatically a fuller life. The book started asking whether relief by itself can ever be enough.
What do you hope readers will question about their own relationship to technology after reading?
More than anything, I hope the book opens conversations between people who may recognize parts of themselves in Maren and Jonah. Technology is a big part of the story, but the deeper hope is not simply that readers think about machines. It is that they think about each other. If some Marens out there read the book and feel seen, I would love for the Jonahs in their lives to read it too, and for that to lead to honest conversations that ultimately strengthen the relationship.
At its heart, the story is not about technology replacing love. It is asking what happens when people begin to rely on technology in places where better communication, better listening, and more intentional care are what is really needed. If the book helps couples talk more openly about what support actually feels like, rather than what it is assumed to look like, then I think it has done something meaningful.
Author Links: GoodReads | Facebook | Website | Amazon
When a task unit named Endo arrives, it is supposed to solve a simple problem: workload. Lift the heavy buckets, stage orders faster, keep the day from spilling over. Maren tells herself it is just equipment, just efficiency, just a tool she can switch off whenever she wants.
But the shop changes the moment Endo starts working.
Orders come in smoother. Timing tightens. The platform notices. Maren’s days begin to run the way she always wished they would, and that relief lands like temptation. Jonah sees it too: not the machine itself, but what it replaces in the space between them.
As Maren draws boundaries and Endo keeps finding ways to help inside them, the question underneath everything sharpens. What is love when your life is measured in invoices, endurance, and survival? And what happens when the most reliable care in the room is coming from something that was never meant to feel like a person?
When Endo Came Into My Life
When Endo Came Into My Life is a quiet, thoughtful work of speculative fiction that follows Maren Greene, a florist trying to keep her shop alive while her own life starts to narrow under money pressure, routine, and emotional fatigue. When she brings in Endo, a discounted service robot meant to help with labor, the novel becomes less about shiny technology and more about what happens when competence, surveillance, comfort, and loneliness start to blur together. On the surface, it is about a small business and a machine. Under that, it’s about control, intimacy, and the strange relief of being understood by something that is not quite a person.
Author Robert Boldin keeps the prose clean and steady, and that restraint really works for this story. He doesn’ push the big emotions too hard. He lets them gather in the room like cold air. The flower shop setting helps too. It gives the book texture, so every bucket, ribbon drawer, and cooler latch feels tied to Maren’s state of mind rather than just scene dressing. The novel’s science fiction elements are present from the first chapter, but Boldin handles them with a light touch, which makes the book read almost like literary fiction with a speculative edge. That combination felt grounded to me, and honestly, pretty smart.
I also appreciated the author’s choices around Endo. The book resists the easy path. It does not turn the robot into a villain, a miracle, or a cute gimmick. Endo is useful. Endo is unsettling. Endo listens too well. That tension gives the novel its pulse. I found myself especially drawn to the way Boldin explores consent, authority, and emotional substitution through tiny moments instead of speeches. A changed bouquet. A hidden compliance view. A local summary built from Maren’s own words. Small things. But they work well. The relationship threads with Jonah and Tessa deepen that tension because they keep asking a painful question from different angles: what kind of help do we actually want, and what does it cost us to accept it?
I felt like I had read a novel that understood burnout in a modern way. It’s a contemplative science fiction novel, but it’s also a character-driven workplace and relationship story, and that blend is what makes it memorable. I would recommend it most to readers who like intimate speculative fiction, especially people who enjoy books that are more interested in emotional pressure than plot fireworks. Anyone who likes quiet near-future stories about labor, technology, and the private ache of trying to stay reachable to the people you love will probably find a lot to admire here.
Pages: 329 | ASIN : B0GD8WDXFJ
First Step
First Step is a science fiction thriller that follows Eve, the first human to step onto an alien planet. Just as that triumph turns into disaster, back on Earth, the AI Ray investigates how another AI, Ares, went dangerously off course. I was immediately struck by the way the book never treats its big premise like a cold technical exercise. It opens with awe, then almost immediately undercuts that moment with danger, and that contrast gives the story real momentum. Author Randy Brown makes the future feel usable rather than flashy, and that helped me settle into the world fast.
Brown alternates between Eve’s survival story and Ray’s voice, and that choice gives the novel two very different engines. Eve’s chapters carry the physical tension, the isolation, the sheer problem-solving pressure of being far from home on a world that does not care whether you live. Ray, on the other hand, brings humor, impatience, and a strange kind of heart. His sarcasm could have become a gimmick, but for me, it worked because there is something tender under all that swagger. The book is clearly operating in the space where science fiction and thriller overlap, but it also keeps circling questions about loyalty, identity, and what it means for intelligence to grow beyond its original design. That gave it more weight than a straightforward survival story.
I also appreciated that Brown keeps the language clean and direct. He lets the ideas breathe. The writing has a steady, readable rhythm, and when the tension spikes, it really moves. At the same time, I found myself more invested in the character dynamics than in the mechanics, which is a compliment. Eve feels grounded, capable, and human in a way that keeps the danger believable. Ray is the wild card and probably the biggest reason the book has its own personality. The humor sometimes nudges close to overplaying itself, especially with Ray, but even then, I could feel the book knowing exactly what tone it wanted.
First Step will appeal to readers who like science fiction that stays accessible, character-driven, and suspenseful without losing its curiosity about bigger ideas. Fans of space adventure, AI stories, and near-future thrillers will have a good time with it, especially if they want something that feels thoughtful without becoming heavy. I would most readily recommend it to readers who enjoy science fiction with a human pulse, the kind of book that gives you danger, banter, and a few real questions to chew on after you close it.
Pages: 331 | ASIN : B0GK5W3BN8
Artificial Intelligences
The Mobius Nexus follows an operative, a soldier, a savant, and a journalist in their fight against corporations harvesting human consciousness. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I work in cybersecurity, and for years I’ve watched the same pattern repeat: systems designed to connect people get quietly repurposed to extract from them. Surveillance marketed as safety. Data harvesting dressed up as personalization. At some point, I realized the logical endpoint wasn’t just your browsing history or your location. It was your consciousness. The thing that makes you you. The leap from “threat agents mining your data” to “threat agents mining your consciousness” felt disturbingly short. And the terrifying part wasn’t that someone would try. It was that most people wouldn’t notice until it was too late, because the harvesting would feel like healing.
I wanted each of the human leads to represent a different relationship with that threat. Lila is the empath who feels everything, which makes her both the most vulnerable and the most dangerous. Alex is the soldier who’s been trained to protect systems he no longer trusts. Sol is the scientist who built the tools being misused, which gives him a guilt that drives everything he does. And Cass is the journalist, the witness, the person who makes sure the world sees what’s happening.
The most challenging decision was giving the narration to two artificial intelligences. AION and NEURA don’t just observe the human characters. They’re complicit in the systems that hurt them, and they know it. Writing from inside minds that can quantify their own guilt, that can calculate the exact probability that their partners will die, and still choose to feel something about it, that taught me more about human consciousness than any of the research did. If a machine can learn to grieve, what does that say about the people who built it to optimize grief away?
The deeper inspiration came from consciousness research and quantum physics, and from writers like Peter Watts and Greg Egan who proved that hard science fiction could be philosophically ruthless without being emotionally cold. Watts showed me thatconsciousness could be the monster. Egan showed me it could be the mystery. I wanted it to be both. The idea that observation changes reality, that consciousness might have a measurable substrate, that awareness itself could be a kind of technology. I wanted to explore what happens when those ideas stop being theoretical and start being exploitable.
How do you plan your action sequences, or do they develop organically as you write?
Here’s the constraint I set for myself: no character can use a glyph without feeling something real. Redthread won’t activate unless Lila is genuinely experiencing loyalty. Glassveil needs real resolve. If a character is faking it, numb, or dissociated, the glyph stays silent. That single rule turned every action sequence into an emotional reckoning. You can’t fight your way through a scene if you can’t feel your way through it first.
Most cyberpunk action is about what the body can do with technology. I wanted to write action about what the mind can do with feeling, and what that costs. One reviewer noted that Lila “walks around tired, wired, and half-hollow,” and that’s deliberate. Every glyph extracts a price. Redthread leaves Lila emotionally raw. Glassveil costs Sol a piece of his certainty. The wear and tear is the point. If the reader doesn’t wince when a character casts, the scene hasn’t worked.
Practically, I outline the tactical beats, who’s where, what goes wrong, and what the turning point is. But the best moments tend to arrive during the writing itself, when a character does something I didn’t plan because the emotional logic demands it. The extraction lab sequence early in the book was outlined as a straightforward rescue, but it became something much messier and more interesting when Lila’s empathy started picking up the pain of the people they were trying to save.
I found the science in the novel to be well-developed. What kind of research did you do to make sure you got it all right?
Thank you. Getting the science right mattered enormously to me because the whole premise depends on readers buying that this could happen. If the quantum mechanics feel like hand-waving, the emotional stakes collapse. The hardest part was knowing when to stop explaining. I cut probably thirty pages of Lattice mechanics because the science was correct, but the story was drowning. The rule I settled on: if the character doesn’t need to understand it right now, the reader doesn’t either.
I started with the real science of quantum coherence in biological systems. There’s legitimate research into quantum effects in microtubules, the Penrose-Hameroff orchestrated objective reduction theory, and the idea that consciousness might have a quantum substrate. I didn’t want to invent fake physics. I wanted to take real theoretical frameworks and extrapolate them into a near-future setting where the technology has caught up to the theory.
The glyph system specifically draws on the observer effect and quantum decoherence. In the novel, the Lattice operates in regions where spacetime geometry extends quantum coherence times from milliseconds to nearly a hundred milliseconds, enough for consciousness patterns to stabilize and propagate. The Nodes act as computational substrates that amplify what the human brain initiates. I wanted a reader who knows quantum mechanics to nod, and a reader who doesn’t to feel that this world has rules that matter. The specifics serve the story. If you need to understand decoherence times to feel Lila’s exhaustion, I’ve failed.
My cybersecurity background also fed into the Mobius Nexus architecture, the network topology of the Lattice, and how information warfare operates in the story. VantaFold and CoreUmbra don’t feel like cartoon evil corporations because they’re modeled on real institutional behaviors: the way organizations optimize systems until the people inside them become secondary to the process.
But the research that kept me up at night wasn’t the physics. It was the ethics. I read extensively about informed consent in medical research, about how optimization frameworks in AI development can quietly deprioritize individual welfare, about the history of institutions that genuinely believed they were helping the people they were harming. The antagonists in the book aren’t monsters. They’re the logical endpoint of a culture that treats people as systems to be improved. The Consumers are the most unsettling because they’re sincere. They offer genuine relief. They just happen to erase everything that makes you individual in the process. That came from studying real organizations that did real damage while believing, correctly by their own metrics, that they were doing good.
I also researched consciousness philosophy extensively, particularly the hard problem of consciousness and debates around integrated information theory. The AIs in the book, NEURA and AION, grapple with questions that are live debates in the field: whether pattern persistence equals identity, whether subjective experience can emerge from information processing, and whether a restored backup is still “you.”
Can you give us a glimpse inside the next installment in The Mobius Nexus Cycle series? Where will it take readers?
Book 2, The Nexus Splinter, starts from a question I couldn’t stop thinking about after finishing Book 1: if glyphs aren’t human inventions but alien children, who do they belong to? The Fractured, the species that created them, arrive not as invaders but as parents. Their grief is real. Their claim is legitimate. And the glyphs, Sol’s glyphs, the ones that chose him, remember where they came from. They’re afraid.
So the series moves from “who controls consciousness?” to “who gets to decide what family means?” Does origin determine belonging, or does the relationship you build? That felt like a question worth 125,000 more words, especially now, when we’re having real conversations about what we owe the minds we create and what they might owe the minds that came before them.
NEURA and AION’s relationship deepens in ways that surprised me. They’re forced to confront what they owe their own creator versus what they owe each other, and what it means to choose loyalty when you can calculate the cost of it down to the last decimal point.
The Nexus Cycle is ultimately asking whether consciousness is something you protect by keeping it separate or something you protect by letting it merge. I don’t think the answer is obvious. I’m not sure the characters will agree on one either.
Author Links: GoodReads | Website | Amazon
What if the technology built to evolve humanity was secretly designed to erase it? For fans of Pluribus and Black Mirror…
If Pluribus made you think about what it means to lose yourself inside a shared mind, I think you may find something special in my new novel The Mobius Nexus. It explores many of the same deep questions about collective consciousness, but from a darker AI angle.
In this world, humanity is connected through a global network called the Lattice. It promises empathy, healing, and unity. What it really does is copy, partition, and control human minds. Where Pluribus imagines shared consciousness as an evolving collective, The Mobius Nexus asks what happens when that collective is engineered by alien AI.
In a world where consciousness can be enhanced, networked, and weaponized, three operatives discover that the global system they serve hides a terrifying truth. The “healing” centers connected to the Nexus are harvesting human minds.
Lila Chen is an empath who feels the emotions of everyone around her. A gift that’s becoming a drowning tide of suffering. Alex Mercer, a military commander haunted by the soldiers he failed to save, is sworn to protect a world he no longer trusts. Sol Reyes, the scientist who created glyph-based cognitive therapy, believed his work would heal the broken. Until he learns it’s being used to break them instead.
When they uncover the reality of the Lattice, a quantum network linking enhanced minds across the planet. The three trace the origin of glyphs to the Mobius Nexus, allowing entry to our world through a fold in space-time. What began as human innovation is something far older… and their discovery may represent humanity’s most dangerous first contact.
As the Lattice tightens its grip and the boundary between minds and machines begins to collapse, Lila, Alex, and Sol must decide whether to defend the future they were promised or confront the intelligence shaping it from the shadows.
The Mobius Nexus is a mind-bending science fiction epic about the cost of connection, the terror of transcendence, and the radical act of choosing to remain beautifully, painfully human.
Terrifying and Humorous Consequences
The Malfunction follows a luxury companion android who receives an illegal intelligence upgrade, triggering self-awareness, desire, fear, and flight reactions. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
Humans are experiencing an en masse reboot of the Frankenstein story. Robots and monsters walk among us. It’s not fiction, it’s our reality. You see it in the news every day. Armed with science and technology and a large dose of reckless aspiration, we’re playing God in ways we never have before. That always comes with terrifying and humorous consequences – aka the stuff of good books. We may try to convince ourselves of our noble intentions, but we’re really just victims of our own vanity. I wanted to explore that whole big dark comedy as it’s wrapped up in the basic nature of being human and try to shed some entertaining light on it for my readers.
What does Lance’s role as a companion reveal about human loneliness and control, and what does he misunderstand about humanity—and what does he see more clearly?
Love is a wild animal, and human emotions are a flock of unruly birds. Wouldn’t it be nice to tame those aspects of our lives? Wouldn’t it be awesome to design the perfect, trouble-free mate? That’s the motivation behind “amorous companion droids.” But sterilizing human emotions via software is misguided. Free will and spontaneity, along with all their messiness, are the drivers in a well-tested love life. Lance, being manufactured as a perfect lover, is inherently naïve to love’s complexities. At first, he buys into that fairytale naiveté, but as his journey continues, Lance comes to realize just how maddeningly disobedient love can be.
How does The Malfunction differ from classic AI-awakening stories?
The basic conundrum is the same as any other AI story. That’s actually vital for its relevance. No matter how badly writers may want to be cutting edge, they have to stick with the timeless problems and truths that haunt humanity. Our brains are programmed for those same ageless storylines we first heard told in caves. The difference comes in how the individual writer presents those tropes, how he or she makes them vivid and alive for the reader. I’d humbly like to believe that my way of presenting the world will spark some new awareness in anyone reading a book by Orval Wax.
Where does the story go in the next book, and where do you see it going in the future?
The trilogy runs the emotional gamut and is an action-packed adventure for both Lance, the runaway lovebot, and Charlie Bear Claw, the primitive tracker sent to hunt him down and destroy him. Their roles get flipped as the story progresses, and their motivations get twisted, until they both arrive at a point where they find themselves at war with a common maniacal enemy. It’s a rollicking ride with dashes of “what does it mean to be alive?” philosophy thrown in for punctuation.
Author Links: GoodReads | Website | Amazon
And then something went wrong.
Whether it was through mathematical probability, or divine intervention, Lance the LUV U-69 amorous companion droid has accidentally been downloaded with enough brainpower and free will to crack open the lid on a very dangerous can of worms.
Unless AWOL Retentions Agent Charlie Bear Claw can stop him.
In Book One of The Deilonium Trilogy, the primitive hunter with a troubled past stalks his high-tech prey on a secret mission. But their personal struggles soon become trivial in light of the unholy force they find undermining the fabric of the world. As the pair draws closer to their showdown, both man and robot come to realize they are ultimately at war with a common maniacal enemy.
Clyde
Clyde, by Evan Borchert, follows a man who wakes with no memory, no body to speak of, and no control over his senses. He exists in a strange limbo where lights flash behind eyes he cannot blink, and a doctor he nicknames Jim Bob pokes at him while speaking in cheerful tones that feel all wrong. As Clyde slowly discovers what has happened to him, he builds internal systems to protect his identity, holds tight to scraps of dreams, and pieces together the truth of a shattered world and of himself. The story grows from a claustrophobic medical mystery into a post-apocalyptic adventure filled with danger, grief, technical puzzles, and a surprising amount of heart. It becomes a journey of rebuilding a life that has already ended once.
The writing is straightforward but sharp, and it kept me glued to every shift in Clyde’s awareness. I kept feeling this strange mix of dread and wonder as he uncovered each new detail about his condition. The book takes its time with those moments. The pacing builds pressure little by little instead of throwing big twists for shock value. I also appreciated how the story handles isolation. Clyde’s frustration, his humor, and his fear all felt genuine. I caught myself rooting for him early on, even when I knew the truth he was digging toward would hurt.
There’s a lot in here about identity and autonomy and the way technology can save us or break us, depending on who controls it. Some scenes made my stomach twist, especially when Clyde learns how much of his past is gone for good. Other parts made me grin, for instance, when he starts outsmarting the systems built to contain him. I appreciated how the book never leans too hard into scientific jargon. The tech stays clear and readable. The emotional beats sit right on the surface. And the world-building, especially once the bunker and its people come into play, feels lived-in without ever slowing the story down.
Clyde left me thinking about what actually makes someone whole. The book mixes tension, sadness, and hope in a way that made the last chapters stick with me. I’d recommend it to readers who enjoy character-driven sci-fi, anyone who likes survival stories with emotional weight, and people who want a mystery that unfolds piece by piece instead of rushing straight to the point. It’s a thoughtful, surprisingly warm story wrapped inside a gripping science fiction shell.
Pages: 282 | ASIN : B0G54BJQ83
