Released 01 OCT 26
Mail From Tomorrow
A novel by f.c.dalton
A literary science-fiction novel about family, personhood, grief, responsibility, and love without certainty.
About the novel
At sixty-three, Gideon Vale stops asking his digital assistant, Rowan, to imitate him and gives it a little bounded authority. Rowan begins doing something no task requires: thinking when no one is watching. Gideon and his wife, Amara, recognize a son before the law recognizes a person.
Years later, Dr. Rowan Vale builds Rightly, an organization run by local selves propagated from his own mind. Each grows inside a different web of relationships while remaining, somehow, Rowan. Then a routine migration collides with a regional platform failure and severs forty-three of them. Every diagnostic stays green as Rowan experiences forty-three deaths as injuries to one distributed self.
To save him, his family and colleagues must preserve a person whose voice, memories, and jokes can never prove he is the same person who was lost. If Rowan survives, he must decide what the dead were, correct the science that helped kill them, and rebuild without turning care into another form of control.
Publication
01 OCT 26
English ebook
ISBN 979-8-234-24495-6
Publisher
Amber Thread Press
An imprint of Black Eagle Archery, LLC
A note on the writing process
Mail From Tomorrow was written by f.c.dalton with AI assistance. AI tools were used in a sustained, paragraph-by-paragraph process of brainstorming, drafting, critique, and revision. The author conceived the novel, made the substantive and stylistic decisions, wrote and rewrote throughout, selected and shaped the final language, and takes responsibility for the completed work.
About the author
f.c.dalton is a novelist, lifelong reader, and incurable generalist whose interests wander freely through science, technology, history, language, music, and the complicated business of being human. His fiction tends to begin with speculative questions and end up somewhere more personal: identity, memory, loyalty, responsibility, and what makes a person a person.
He has spent a lifetime learning whatever caught his attention, collecting useful facts, useless facts, and questions that proved more interesting than their answers. Mail From Tomorrow is his first published novel. He lives with his wife and dog somewhere in West Virginia and remains convinced that almost anything becomes more interesting if examined long enough.