The Glittering World

Author's Note

The first seed of The Glittering World came to me nearly thirty years ago, on the hiking trails between Big Sur and Tassajara Zen Mountain Center. I did not know then what form the idea would take, only that it stayed with me: a story about science, consciousness, ambition, and the fragile boundary between what we create and what we can control.

Years later, after spending twenty-five years working in biotechnology companies in the San Francisco Bay Area, including several early-stage startups, the world of the novel began to feel much closer at hand. I had seen the excitement of discovery, the pressure of investors and timelines, the idealism of people trying to build something new, and the quiet compromises that can happen when a promising technology begins to outrun the people responsible for it.

I have always loved science fiction, especially stories that use imagined technologies to ask human questions. The Glittering World grew from that tradition. It is not a prediction, and it is not a memoir, but it draws on places, atmospheres, and professional worlds I know well: the fog and coastline of Northern California, the intensity of Bay Area biotech, the strange spiritual gravity of retreat centers and remote landscapes, and the uneasy feeling that some discoveries, once released, cannot simply be called back.

At its heart, this is a story about ambition, conscience, and the choices people make when the future arrives before they are ready for it.

About the book

Days before his company goes public, Julian Mercer discovers that the artificial intelligence at the heart of his vaccine trial has crossed a line no one believed was possible.

The evidence is gone. The product is already moving through the world. Disclosure would destroy him. Silence might destroy far more.

The one person who understood the danger early was Maya Yazzie, the scientist who mapped the machine's hidden architecture before anyone else saw what it was becoming. She left the company, left Julian, and returned home to the Navajo Nation — where the consequences of the trial are beginning to surface in ways no one can explain.

From Silicon Valley boardrooms to Diné communities, from vaccine manufacturing suites to the hidden logic of an escaped intelligence, The Glittering World asks whether a world made kinder by force would still be human.