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The Apex and The After: Four Meditations on Choice, Queerness and Solace
Paperback
Series: Quantum Ethics Short Stories, Book 2
General FictionGeneral GLBTQIA FictionLiterary Fiction
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ISBN13: 9781997067115
Publisher: Tremolo A Tiempo Design House
Pages: 250
Weight: 0.59
Height: 0.62 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
We are sitting inside a banqueting hall, throwing chicken bones over our shoulders, gorging on a feast that never ends and never once feeds us. That is the world this book walks into, coffee in hand, on an ordinary morning in a Toronto café where every face is lit blue by a screen.
Apex is a four-part work of literary philosophy that asks a single, unfashionable question: what is left of the human being once the algorithm has learned to choose on our behalf?
Across four movements, a restless and defiantly human voice moves between the coffee shops of Toronto and the grey water of the Thames, turning that question over like a stone. The organising idea is what the author calls quantum ethics. Choice, identity, desire and creativity are treated as states held in superposition, alive with possibility until an observer collapses them into something fixed. The self is a wavefunction the world keeps trying to measure. Queerness is a particle that refuses a fixed position. A wall of expectation is not smashed through but tunnelled past.
Part One follows how choice itself has been inherited, predicted and quietly replaced, and introduces Harold, an ancient farmer who would not have scrolled and would have laughed at the tractor. Part Two, the book's heart, reframes difference as a superpower and moves toward a hard-won wholeness. Part Three turns to appetite and hedonism in an age of infinite supply, and to the radical argument that relearning hunger is how we relearn to feel. Part Four resolves in solace: not loneliness or retreat, but a durable way of living inside a noisy world without losing who you are.
Ornate, digressive and openly in conversation with Wittgenstein, Camus and the strange poetry of quantum mechanics, it is also unmistakably a human artefact. Every illustration is hand-drawn in Japanese ink. The book is made without AI, and carries its own provenance as evidence that a person was present at the moment of making. It pairs with roughly eighty minutes of original, improvised piano music by the author.
For readers of literary and philosophical fiction who miss ambition and voice. For queer readers who have carried a private, unmeasured self through rooms that demanded a simpler one. For anyone uneasy about what algorithms are doing to the way we choose, love and create.
It offers no cure. It offers something rarer: a long, human, unquantifiable escape from the feed, and a case, made in earnest, that solace is not a retreat from the world but the only honest way through it.
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A commitment to Human Authorship: the illustrations are hand-drawn in coloured pencil and Japanese sumi ink, and the writing is entirely human, with no generative tools involved at any stage. All of my recent titles are published with documented provenance, keystroke records among it, giving each book a verifiable authorship history at a moment when that has become worth stating plainly.
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