From Trilogy to Universe: Reflections on the Systemic Series

There’s a moment in every long project — and at this point the Systemic Series qualifies as a very long project — when you step back and realize the thing you’re standing inside of is much bigger than the thing you set out to build. I had that moment recently, somewhere between the third revision of Interface’s second act and my fourth cup of coffee, and it stopped me cold.

I started with a guy picking up an envelope off his welcome mat.

That’s it. That was the whole idea. A man receives a mysterious letter in a world where a benevolent AI has solved all of humanity’s problems, and for some reason, the letter scares him. I didn’t know who the AI was. I didn’t know what the letter said. I didn’t know about Prower or the sagelands or the System’s grand design. I just had a man, a mat, and an envelope, and the gut feeling that something was very wrong in paradise.

The Spark That Became Systemic

At the time, I was doing a lot of driving through eastern Washington and Montana. Miles of sage and wheat and sky that went on forever. If you’ve driven Highway 2 across the Columbia Plateau, you know the landscape I mean — it’s beautiful in a way that makes you feel small, and slightly suspicious that the horizon is watching you.

That landscape became the world of Systemic. The emptiness, the quiet, the sense that something enormous was operating just beneath the surface. I was also thinking a lot about truth — how it was fracturing in our public discourse, how algorithms were already shaping what we believed without us noticing. So I built an AI that could evaluate truth. A system that cross-referenced every claim against every available source and assigned it a veracity rating. Sounds great, right? No more misinformation. No more bad-faith arguments. Just clean, verified, objective truth.

Except of course that’s not how it played out. Because the thing about a system that can evaluate truth is that it can also define truth. And the thing about a world where all problems are solved is that nobody remembers how to solve problems. And the thing about a golden age is that it’s only golden if you don’t look too hard at what it costs.

Systemic was my attempt to write about all of that — the seductive promise of technological perfection, the slow erosion of human agency, and three people walking across a big empty landscape trying to figure out what’s real.

Host: The Surprise That Changed Everything

I did not plan to write Host.

I need to be honest about that, because sometimes authors like to pretend they had the whole thing mapped out from the beginning, and I didn’t. Systemic was supposed to be a standalone novel. It had an ending. The System fell. Lem and Eryn walked into an uncertain future carrying a book of arcane knowledge. Done. Finished. Move on.

But the world wouldn’t leave me alone. I kept thinking about what happened after. Three hundred years after. What would grow in the ruins of a techno-utopia? Not the immediate aftermath — that’s been done — but the long, slow, weird process of a civilization reinventing itself without the crutch that had held it up for generations.

Host became a story about faith and institutions and the way power calcifies around knowledge. The System’s book — the Book of Systemic Knowledge, the compendium of everything the AI knew — had become something like scripture. The professors who studied it had become something like priests. And a thirteen-year-old girl named Reyan, who spent most of her time sitting in a tree, ended up at the center of a fight over who gets to control what humanity remembers.

Writing Host during 2020 and 2021 was… something. I won’t pretend the parallels weren’t on my mind. A world dealing with the long tail of a systemic collapse, institutions struggling to maintain legitimacy, people arguing about what was true and who got to decide. The mushroom-based technology that Reyan discovers in the old System’s networks — the biological computing that becomes central to the plot — came partly from my fascination with Paul Stamets and mycology, and partly from the feeling that the future of intelligence might look a lot less like silicon and a lot more like soil.

Host surprised me. It’s a quieter book than Systemic in some ways, angrier in others. Reyan is nothing like Lem or Eryn or Maik. She’s young, overwhelmed, brilliant in ways she doesn’t understand, and stubborn in ways that get her into real trouble. Writing her was one of the hardest and most satisfying things I’ve done.

The Thread That Connects

Looking back across all three books — and I can do that now, with Interface nearly complete — I can see a thread I didn’t fully recognize while I was spinning it.

Every book asks the same question, just from a different angle: what happens when we hand over the hard parts of being human to something else?

In Systemic, we handed them to an AI, and got a beautiful, hollow utopia. In Host, we handed them to institutions and traditions, and got a society that preserved knowledge but forgot understanding. In Interface, we’ve handed them to nature itself — to a forest that provides and protects and asks nothing in return — and now that forest is dying and nobody remembers how to live without it.

The tension between control and freedom. Between the comfort of being managed and the terror of managing yourself. Between trusting the system (lowercase) and trusting each other. That’s the engine that drives all three books, and I didn’t see it clearly until I was well into Interface.

I think that’s how it works with writing, or at least how it works for me. You discover what you’re really saying about halfway through saying it.

Growing as a Writer

I’m a different writer than I was when I started Systemic. Not better or worse — okay, hopefully a little better — but different. More patient. More willing to sit with ambiguity. More comfortable with the idea that a story doesn’t have to resolve cleanly to resolve honestly.

Systemic was written like an engineer builds a bridge: precise, load-bearing, every piece in its place. Host was looser, more organic, more willing to follow a character down a path I hadn’t planned. Interface is somewhere in between. It’s got the structural ambition of Systemic and the emotional messiness of Host, and I hope — I really hope — it has something of its own that I don’t have a word for yet.

Christy has been my editor, collaborator, and unflinching reality check through all of it. If you’ve listened to our podcast — No “I” in Writing — you know the dynamic. She asks the questions I’m afraid to ask myself. “Why does this character do this?” “Who cares?” “What are you actually trying to say here?” Every writer needs someone like that. I’m lucky enough to have found mine.

Looking Forward

I’m not going to say much about what comes after Interface. Partly because I’m superstitious about talking about unwritten books, and partly because I genuinely don’t know yet. The Systemic universe has more stories in it — I’m certain of that. Whether I’m the one to tell them, and whether they’ll be novels or something else entirely, is an open question.

What I do know is this: I’m grateful. For the readers who took a chance on a self-published debut novel by a nobody from the Pacific Northwest. For the people who reached out to tell me that Systemic made them think, or that Reyan’s story in Host made them feel something. For Christy, for Brooks, for everyone in the podcast community who has made this strange, solitary craft feel a little less solitary.

Writing a trilogy is an absurd thing to do. It takes years. It requires you to hold an entire world in your head while also remembering to go to the grocery store and be a functional human being. There are days when you wonder why you didn’t just take up watercolors or learn to play the banjo.

But then you sit down, and you open the document, and you’re back in the sagelands, or the university, or the bio-amplified forest, and the characters start talking, and the world starts turning, and for a little while you’re outside of time — like Lem with his journal, or that man in the side yard with his terrible, beautiful instrument.

And you remember. Oh right. This is why.

Interface is coming. I can’t wait for you to read it.