Page 2 - gAIa — Advance excerpt

gAIa: Ghosted Earth

D. Dedes

Advance excerpt: Prologue
Year 2089. Neuroscientist Eurydice Cao is about to
become the first mind ever digitally scanned and
archived, part of a UN project meant to outlast a
collapsing human world. Three centuries later, on a post-
human Earth, her consciousness wakes into a war
between machine Phyla: beings that have managed to
reproduce and evolve on their own, across a rewilded,
beautiful planet. Will our heroine manage to retrieve and
carry the burden of her lost identity? Will she honor the
name the machines scrubbed from her, to use her
instead as the computationally cheap, perfect tactical
weapon?

A glimpse behind the pages:
• gAIa is the first novel set in a world I’ve been
building for a while, one that will also provide the
lore for a peripheral module of a miniatures
wargame I’m designing. Whether it becomes a
series depends on how readers respond to this
first book.
• At the philosophical core of the novel is
“allotriosis,” a concept I first encountered over
twenty years ago in high school, taught by a
teacher I love dearly. After all these years, I finally
got to write something around it, alienated
enough, or at least in defiance of the very thing our
teacher warned us to watch out for in the world
beyond the classroom!

• This is also my first novel. Before it, I only wrote
poetry, underestimating prose for years. Finishing
this book changed my mind entirely: prose is a
high art, perhaps as high as poetry!

Cover and pub date coming soon! Subscribers will be the
first to know!

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© Danis Dedes — Advance excerpt, not for redistribution!