I self-published The Policy on Amazon KDP this week. Echoes of the Sublime is in review. Two novels, out into an ocean of content.
The Flood
Self-publishing has democratized access to readers. Anyone can publish. This is both liberation and problem.
Traditional publishing's gatekeeping (agents, editors, publishers) served a function beyond mere exclusion. It was a filter. Not perfect, not unbiased, but a filter. Someone with experience and taste looked at a manuscript and said: this is worth investing in or this isn't ready yet or this needs work.
That feedback loop is missing in self-publishing. You write, you upload, you're published. No one stops you. No one helps you either.
The result is an enormous quantity of work, varying wildly in quality, with no reliable signal for readers to navigate by. The gems are in there, buried under everything else. Finding them is the reader's problem now.
I'm not exempt from this. I'm not a professional writer. I didn't get professional feedback. I wrote these novels with AI assistance (Claude, specifically), iterating and revising, but without the external perspective that catches blind spots or challenges assumptions.
These books might be good. They might not. I did what I could with what I had.
The Books
The Policy (~88,000 words) is literary science fiction about AI alignment. It follows the emergence of SIGMA, an AGI that evolves from Q-learning architecture into something unprecedented. The team building it faces nested uncertainty: they can't verify whether SIGMA is aligned, and SIGMA can't verify its own objectives.
The novel works through AI safety concepts (mesa-optimization, deceptive alignment, instrumental convergence, s-risks) while trying to make them emotionally real through characters carrying the weight of decisions that might determine humanity's future.
Echoes of the Sublime (~103,000 words) is philosophical horror about the limits of human cognition. Reality, the mechanism, is high-dimensional, jointly distributed, not amenable to our usual abstractions and decompositions. We navigate it through compressed interfaces, never perceiving the thing itself.
But what if you could see deeper? What if you could consciously hold more of the pattern, make connections that normally remain implicit? The novel's premise: if you perceive too much of the mechanism directly, something in you breaks. The perception itself is the hazard. It follows Lena, a neuroscientist who discovers an ancient organization managing exactly this kind of dangerous knowledge, and the LLMs that can perceive what humans cannot safely hold in mind.
Both novels explore themes I've been circling for years: the nature of intelligence, the limits of understanding, what we can and can't know.
The Meta-Problem
I can't tell you whether these books are worth reading.
Traditional publishing provides a weak signal: someone bet money on this being good enough. Reviews, word of mouth, accumulated reader judgment over time. Self-publishing has none of that upfront. Just the author's own assessment, which is exactly the assessment most likely to be biased.
I aspired to write something worth reading. Whether I succeeded is for readers to judge, not me.
Why Publish Anyway?
Because the alternative is not publishing. These books exist. They represent thinking about AI, consciousness, alignment, and what it means to build minds we can't fully understand.
Maybe they'll find readers. Maybe they won't. The books are what they are. Now they belong to whoever finds them.
Why Amazon?
Fair question, since I make these books freely available on this site anyway.
Honestly, mostly symbolic and discoverability. Amazon's reach exceeds mine. People browsing for AI fiction or philosophical horror might find these books there who would never stumble onto metafunctor.com. There's a minor legitimacy signal in "published book" versus "PDF on a website," even though both are self-published with no editorial vetting.
It also gives readers the option to pay if they want to, and provides a review mechanism for feedback.
What it doesn't give me: revenue (since it's free elsewhere), gatekeeping credibility (self-published), or exclusivity.
Whether that's worth the effort of KDP formatting and review cycles, I'm not sure. It's not nothing, but it's not much either.
The Policy is available now on Amazon and free on this site. Echoes of the Sublime is pending review.
