Upon the Mirror Sea

Frequently Asked Questions

Should I read this book?

This is a book for people who loved The City and the City, Blindsight, Annihilation, Diaspora, Gnomon, and The Quantum Thief. For enjoyers of the web fiction of qntm, nostalgebraist, and ctrlcreep. It is by turns a slow-burn, paranoid institutional thriller and an attempt to capture something true, ecstatic, and frightening about the nature of mind.

It is dense with jargon both invented and borrowed from the worlds of computer science, phenomenology, and psychedelics. This is catnip for some readers and poison for others, and you may already know which you are. However, I encourage you to treat this density as texture. I am building a vibe, not delivering a math lesson. Our protagonist, Mona, is a mediocre student of mathematics and doesn’t understand much of what’s being said around her, either.

Content warnings: recreational drug use, gaslighting, psychosis, graduate school.

How long is this thing?

The book is about 104,000 words long, or about 350 printed pages.

Is it done done? When and how was this originally published?

Yes, it's done. The text on this site is the final, authoritative version. I may occasionally pop in to fix a typo or a messy turn of phrase, but you should be confident that if you read now, you will be getting the same story your friend reads a few years later.

The online publication history is messy. Some version of this story has been on the drawing board since 2019. In 2023 I serialized a version of this to near-completion on Twitter. In 2024 and 2025 I intensely reworked the book and briefly took it down in order to take a shot at traditional publishing.

Are you Chinese or Chinese-American?

No. This is important information for some readers evaluating a novel that is set almost entirely in China, features a primarily Chinese cast of characters, and toys with a future where Shanghai is in some ways the center of our technological universe. I approach all this with a degree of humility. This is a story by someone who has been to Shanghai but not lived there; who speaks Mandarin haltingly, not fluently. Some of you will find mistakes here, but hopefully no blunders.

In the words of Kaiser Kuo, I hope to see "more light and less heat" generated by the relationship between the West and China. I would love to read the Chinese equivalent of UTMS: science fiction that approaches our fraught relationship, with honesty and curiosity, from the other direction.

Is any of this real?

“Neikotics” is a vibey extrapolation from trends in computing and consciousness research more than anything to do with serious neuroscience. The Mirror Sea feels like a distantly plausible extension of developments in differential privacy, homomorphic computing, and image fingerprinting. “Loop-lock” and “quadratic belief” are real things the computer is already doing to you.

What are the Ripples? What is the Mirror Sea?

I don't know, but it all started with this tweet:

our own awareness and study of egregores is itself enginnered by them, but it’s nuclear fusion, a controlled reaction, a controversial fire both powerful and dangerous
@syntacrobat

Will I ever be able to buy a print copy?

I'd love this. If you know an editor at a small press who might be a fit, please put us in touch.

Will you write more fiction?

Yes.

Will there ever be a sequel to this one?

I am not promising it, but I know what happens next (and what happened all those years ago) — and I’d be troubled never to bring Mona’s story to its fullest conclusion. This book is in some ways both the prequel and the sequel to the one I originally set out to write; there is quite a bit of material I discarded in an attempt to produce something novel-shaped.

Again, if you want this, please tell me.

How can I support this project?

The best thing you can do for the book is to help it find its audience. Tell people you think would enjoy it to read it. If you want to support me financially, use these:

May I contact you?

Please do! My contact info is on my personal website.