Alan Safahi

A therapy that removes a disease from your genome cannot tell where the disease stops. It could keep going, past healing, into making you more. Where would you draw that line, and who gets to hold the pen? Utopia: The First Awakening.

Utopia: The First Awakening is Book One of a trilogy. It opens in a Berkeley lab, moves to a city floating in the Pacific, and stands on its own. The later books carry the story past the island. Start with the first one.

Utopia runs the way its founder swore on a napkin it would: recycling feeds the building, the building feeds the housing, the housing feeds the farms. A city that eats its own waste and grows past a hundred thousand people. Its first kids write Utopian on forms. #SciFi

Four scientists. Two billionaires. A floating city raised from the ocean's plastic, and a superintelligence built to run it, benevolent by design. Utopia: The First Awakening, $0.99 on Kindle and free in Kindle Unlimited: amazon.com/dp/B0H995HKDP

"And there's never a line. There's just a little more every day, and every day it's reasonable." The ethicist in Utopia: The First Awakening, holding a veto and waiting for one clean moment worth spending it on.

Some head starts close: the first phones bought a few years of advantage, then everyone had one. Others compound. Sell people more years and quicker minds, and the first buyers set the terms while the price falls. Which kind are we building? The question under Utopia.

In my novel the decision the world will one day hang them for is made in the afternoon, over coffee that goes cold. Nobody in the room is greedy. Everyone is right. That is the part that frightens me. alansafahi.com/blog/a-head-s…

On Utopia, a city floating in the Pacific, a pod of whales crosses the cleared water one summer. Children raised on the platform see something alive out there that nobody planted, penned or made. The island tracks the pod for two days and names them. #Worldbuilding

I build AI for a living and wrote Utopia: The First Awakening with AI at the desk, openly. The hardest chapter was the happy one: four good years on a floating city, written as real. A machine can draft joy. Deciding it had to be true before anything else was mine. #AmWriting

In Utopia: The First Awakening a city grown from the ocean's garbage spends years clearing the gyre. Then one morning every screen on the island shows open, empty, moving water where the worst of it had been, and the whole headquarters stops work to watch. #SciFi

A floating city raised from the Pacific garbage patch. It grows its own food and prints a house in an afternoon. A squall comes in and twenty thousand people run for cover. It can do anything. It cannot stop the rain. alansafahi.com/blog/paradise…

A superintelligence that gets everything right except the question. It hands us exactly what we ask for, at civilization scale, from a species that never agreed on what to ask. Utopia: The First Awakening, $0.99, free in Kindle Unlimited: amazon.com/dp/B0H995HKDP

A conference on the end of the world, held two floors above a casino. Nobody asks what the machine is for. In my novel that silence is where the trouble starts. alansafahi.com/blog/the-wish…

Written into Utopia's founding contract, above the money: any one of four scientists can stop any line of the work, and it stays stopped through a review the money is not allowed into. Fragile in one place, on purpose. $0.99 on Kindle: amazon.com/dp/B0H995HKDP

Utopia: The First Awakening is Book One of a trilogy. It is the story of how paradise got its mind: a lab, an island, and a contract signed near midnight by people who were still frightened. Book One stands on its own. Books Two and Three carry what they built past the island.

I build AI for a living and wrote Utopia: The First Awakening with AI at the desk, openly. The conference scene is one I have sat through in real life, in different hotels. A machine can draft a panel. Deciding which silence in that room was the dangerous one was mine. #AmWriting

A square with a fountain. Old men at a board game, children between the planters. The man who built Utopia says the recycled tonnage is an excuse. He built a place where a man born on garbage can feel he is from somewhere. $0.99 on Kindle: amazon.com/dp/B0H995HKDP

Utopia: The First Awakening is Book One of a trilogy. It begins in a Berkeley lab with four people and a plastic continent on a screen, and ends somewhere none of them planned to be. Book One is complete on its own. Books Two and Three carry the arc onward. Start at the start.

People ask whether the AI wrote my AI novel. I used it openly, the way I use it at work, and every scene in Utopia: The First Awakening is one I chose, cut, rewrote or fought for. The machine drafts. It does not decide what a human being is worth. That was my job. #AmWriting

The island can feed you, house you, heal you and, for a price, make you more. There are two things it cannot build: a reason why, and a promise that the man who cannot pay is worth the same as the man who can. Which of those would you trust a machine to supply?