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The Lowest Common Denominator
Supplicant follows a mother and son being used as fuel to keep the undying elite alive, who rebel and fight to liberate the supplicants. The idea that prayer can be measured, directed, and weaponized is central to the novel. When did that concept first take shape for you?
Like many veterans, I have found myself in places where there were few atheists. Prayer is an important, powerful force to me. The idea for Supplicant came when I watched Pope Francis hang on to life against impossible odds. “What if …” I thought. “What if such awesome power could be measured and replicated for others?” I wondered what the effects on an already unstable society might be.
KAX’s story carries much of the novel’s emotional weight. What drew you to her perspective?
KAX represents the lowest common denominator in a world where life has been made cheap. She holds within her the awesome power humanity gives each of us — a power that asserts itself in the worst of times. So, she became the obvious force behind the story.
The creation of supplicants raises deep ethical questions about autonomy and exploitation. How did you approach building that system?
Foundations for the world I imagined in Supplicant already exist — and may be far closer to realization in some laboratories than we care to imagine. Mankind’s ugliest concepts have never failed to find fertile soil. I only had to imagine the progression leading toward them. War, terrible disease, economic ruin, and the availability of a small privileged group to avoid them were not hard to envision.
The novel engages deeply with religious ideas while also challenging them. How do you hope readers interpret that tension?
Each of us is truly “hardwired” (in our parietal cortex, to be exact) toward faith in forces greater than ourselves. The greatest of us, along with the worst addicts, strive to attune ourselves to this reality — but life and the friction of living almost always get in the way. KAX and her son were led to their faith through a terrible experience, as others among us have been as well. I have seen hints that others have found their way to the enlightenment that religion promises. Still, it eludes almost all of us. I hope readers will find hope in my small book that most of us will, eventually, follow.
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Supplicant
Supplicant is a science fiction novel with a strong dystopian streak, and its core idea is sharp right from the start: in Kip Cassino’s future, prayer has been measured, weaponized, and folded into the machinery of power itself. A researcher named Mason Pratt proves that directed prayer can preserve life, and centuries later that discovery has helped create a brutal world ruled by the long-lived elite, sustained by engineered “supplicants” who exist to pray for them without end. From there, the novel follows violence, political maneuvering, and the fate of KAX, one of the surviving supplicants, as the story turns that big speculative premise into something much more intimate and disturbing.
What I enjoyed most was the book’s willingness to go all in on its premise. Cassino does not treat the idea of prayer as a soft symbol or a vague spiritual backdrop. He treats it like infrastructure, like currency, like oil in the pipes of civilization. I found that fascinating. There is a real chill in the way the novel imagines faith being absorbed into systems of ownership, biotech, and hierarchy. At its best, the writing has that old-school speculative fiction energy where one bold idea keeps radiating outward and changing everything it touches. You can feel the author thinking through consequences, and I respected that. Even when the book gets blunt, it’s rarely lazy. It wants to ask what happens when something sacred gets processed by institutions until it becomes another tool for control.
The novel is vivid, sometimes almost brutally so, and it doesn’t flinch from cruelty. KAX’s storyline, especially, is hard to read at times. There were stretches where I admired the conviction behind the storytelling, and other stretches where the book leaned so hard into horror that it was shocking. I kept coming back to the fact that Cassino gives KAX an inner life, not just a role in the machinery of the plot. The book is full of excess, but underneath it I could feel a serious concern with dignity, survival, and the damage done when people are reduced to functions. That gave the novel weight. It kept it from feeling empty.
I’d recommend Supplicant most to readers who like speculative fiction that is idea-driven, dark, and unapologetically severe. If someone enjoys dystopian science fiction that wrestles with religion, power, bioengineering, and the moral cost of building a society on human dependence, this book will give them a lot to chew on. For people who appreciate ambitious genre fiction that is willing to be unsettling, provocative, and sometimes messy in pursuit of a big thought, I think it will leave a mark.
Pages: 326 | ASIN : B0GMK71BX2
