Writing the Post-Equatorial Trilogy with AI

How a software developer wrote three novels in four months with an unusual collaborator.

I spent thirty-five years writing code. When I decided to write fiction, I approached it the same way I approached every other engineering problem — methodically, with the right tools for the job.

The right tool, it turned out, was an AI.

I wrote Where the Voices Were in collaboration with ChatGPT. For The Remedy and Threshold I worked with Claude, Anthropic's large language model. I disclose this in each book. People have questions — reasonable ones — about what that collaboration actually looked like. This page is my attempt to answer them honestly.

What the AI Did

The AI was a working partner in the practical sense. It researched historical events and explained how things work — the mechanics of infrastructure collapse, the logistics of long-term survival, the way institutions fail. It helped develop plot structure and worked through the internal logic of scenes. It wrote most of the prose in draft form. When I asked whether something was credible, it answered. When I asked for a critique of a passage, a chapter, or a full book, it gave me one.

What I Did

I created the story world, the characters, and the themes. I decided what the trilogy was about and what questions it would refuse to answer cleanly. And I edited constantly — because AI-generated prose drifts. It contradicts itself. It repeats. It loses the thread of a character or wanders away from where the story needs to go. Every draft the AI produced needed to be pulled back into shape, and that pulling was the work.

The story I wanted to tell — the moral questions at the center of each book — is not something an AI proposed. The AI helped me build the vessel. The cargo was mine.

A Question Worth Asking

Filmmakers have used CGI for thirty years. Nobody asks whether Avatar is a "real film" because computers generated its landscapes, or whether the director's vision is diminished because he didn't build the world by hand. The question audiences ask — rightly — is whether the story works. Whether it moves them. Whether it stays with them after they leave the theater.

I'd suggest the same standard applies here. The trilogy was built with AI the way films are built with CGI — as a tool in service of a story that existed before the tool was picked up. Whether that story works is the only question that matters.