my work
My work deals predominantly with the central (and prodigiously enduring) problems of philosophy and religion. These include the stark anomaly of human consciousness, the paradox of free will in a mechanistic universe, and the possibility of morality in a world with, palpably, no inherent moral shape to it. Ultimately, I believe the human problem is unary: that of being an exquisitely sensitive spark of awareness irretrievably trapped in a dying hunk of meat and whirling through an empty and Godless cosmos.I tell fables about people trying to make sense of that. (The fabulous part is that, sometimes, they succeed.) They are helped along, and occasionally head-faked, by the findings of very new and culturally disruptive sciences and technologies such as evolutionary psychology, cognitive neuroscience, genetics/genomics, artificial intelligence, and this wacky Internet thingy. I believe that the insights of these vernal disciplines into our eternal mysteries may be profound.
Perhaps seemingly incongruously, my work also tends to feature rather a lot of slam-bang action – two-fisted gunplay, leaps from burning buildings, demonstrably unstoppable hitmen, complex polygonal Mexican standoffs, white-knuckle computer hacking – all intended to give the reader a ride like Neal Stephenson just strapped him to a rocket, and then John Woo blew it up with a second, bigger, rocket. I believe in the revelatory power of human extremity.
