After fifteen years of carrying this idea around in my head, I’ve finally decided to commit to writing what I call the “Impossible Scenario” novel. It’s taken the emergence of AI as a creative partner—not a ghostwriter, but a thinking companion—to make me feel ready to tackle this project properly.
The decision comes at a crossroads with my other works in progress. I have two novels currently on my desk, each carrying their own complications. The mystery-thriller has become a source of creative burnout—I need distance from it to regain perspective. The other project sits on an exceptional foundation, but my experiments with AI-assisted drafting yielded surprisingly sophisticated results, which has left me questioning my own role in the process.
Rather than push through the resistance, I’m stepping back from both and turning toward the project that energizes me most: a science fiction exploration of two interconnected concepts that have fascinated me for years.
The first is the possibility that humans, not artificial intelligence, might be the truly “unaligned” entities in our technological future. While we obsess over aligning AI with human values, what if our own values and behaviors are fundamentally misaligned with sustainable, rational existence?
The second concept I’m calling the “paradox of abundance”—the counterintuitive problems that emerge not from scarcity, but from having too much of what we think we want.
What excites me most about this project is the absence of creative baggage. Unlike my other novels, which carry the weight of false starts and overthinking, the Impossible Scenario feels clean, urgent, and ready to be explored. It’s the novel I can throw myself into without the usual creative angst.
The plan is to use AI as a development tool—a sophisticated sounding board for working through plot mechanics, exploring implications, and stress-testing ideas. Not to write the novel, but to help me think through it more thoroughly than I could alone.
After fifteen years of mental preparation, it’s time to find out what this impossible scenario actually looks like on the page.
