One thing I failed to appreciate when I started my writing career was how much of storytelling is iterative. As I read multiple works by the same author I would notice repeating themes and concepts and wonder why the author felt the need to constantly come back to the same handful of things over and over again. Didn’t they have anything fresh to write about?

Now I am older and wiser, or at least I have found myself trapped in the same dilemma that I’m sure prompted those writers to come back to the same concepts time and time again. Twice, in Pay the Piper and the Triad Worlds trilogy, I’ve added AI as a kind of subtheme that played out through the course of the story. Ever since I first met Lt. Cmdr. Data on the Enterprise I’ve found the idea of an artificial life fascinating. Watching as the actual technology behind AI develops I’ve be come a lot more skeptical of it, both in whether it can actually exist in a form we’d recognize as “life” and whether it will be useful to creative people if it remains just a tool, but I’ve already addressed that second topic recently so I won’t rehash my thoughts here.

What’s really come to interest me about AI is the culture that births it. The more I see of Silicon Valley the more it reminds me of the medieval alchemist – a scholar who knows a handful of true, verifiable facts with repeatable effects on the world and sells their usefulness by promising wild things. Endless Wealth. Immortality. Life from nothing.

Like those alchemists, Silicon Valley has proven incapable of fulfilling those promises. As the wealth they promised imploded with the loss of venture capital and the leaders of the tech giants slowly age further and further the imagination of the public is drawn more and more to the promise that they will one day create life. Videos of modern day golems performing tasks abound. And it does make a certain degree of sense if you think about it logically.

Alchemists did create some very real innovations. Modern chemists are their descendants and chemistry brought us plastic, rubber, gasoline and refined fissionables for nuclear power plants. The tech giants brought us Amazon, Facebook and Twitter so surely there’s something else there they can offer. We just have to trust them. Have a little more faith.

The faith is the thing that fascinates me.

Human beings have a deeply rooted need to revere something, to place their faith in some concept or ideal that will transform them and bring them in contact with something more than human. Our Lords of Technology are no different. Elon Musk debates Simulation Theory. Yuval Harari pitches the Singularity. Ultimately, they are still men crafting idols with their own hands and insisting they have speech and will usher us into heaven.

If we follow these men blindly, by the end of the 21st century we will all pray in binary at an alter of electricity and semiconductors. In time, we’ll forget we made these gods and perhaps even what it means to build them. Or will we? Is such a thing possible? And would it be so bad if that did come about? What would it take, anyway?

They’re fascinating questions. So I turn my pen down well trod paths and seek to tell a story about them. I hope you’ll come with my for the ride as we embark on The Sidereal Saga.