![\"Photographic](\"https:\/\/lawrencenault.me\/journal\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/Lawrence_Nault_Mind_Map_3000-1024x717.jpg\")
What Does Any of This Have to Do With Anything Else?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Looking across my work, I can understand why someone might have difficulty finding a common thread. There are children’s adventures and young-adult environmental fantasy novels, speculative fiction exploring artificial intelligence, human identity, and our relationship with the planet, nonfiction books about privacy and surveillance, research papers examining digital platforms as institutions of authority, and public-policy resources intended to help communities make decisions about infrastructure, governance, and their futures. Then there are the films, podcasts, poetry, photography, and personal reflections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
From the outside, it might appear that I’m jumping from subject to subject, following whatever happens to catch my attention. To some extent, that’s true. Curiosity has always been a powerful influence on what I choose to explore, and I’ve never been particularly interested in restricting myself to one genre or subject simply because that’s where someone expects to find me. But as I began laying everything out, I realized that while the subjects were different, the questions connecting them were remarkably consistent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I initially experimented with creating a visual representation using generative AI. The results were interesting and helped establish a direction, but they didn’t quite capture the relationships I wanted to show. So I turned to GIMP, collected photographs that reflected the different areas of my work, and began constructing the map myself. Each series, research project, and collection found its place, with connecting paths representing the ideas running between them. What began as an exercise in organizing my work gradually became an exploration of why I’d created it in the first place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Mountain Hermit Was Never Really About the Mountain<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
For more than twenty years, I wrote and created under the name The Mountain Hermit. I’ve recently begun retiring that identity, but the philosophy behind it isn’t going anywhere. The name emerged during a period when I was stepping back from a world in which I had exercised considerable control and influence. In that world, authority was considered necessary. Decisions needed to be made, directions established, and outcomes achieved, and I had become quite good at operating within those expectations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But I had also come to recognize something uncomfortable. The very influence that helped me achieve what the world defined as success could make it harder for other people to pursue their own hopes. My authority, and even my physical presence, could shape what others believed they were permitted to do, sometimes without my saying anything at all. I began to question whether the influence I had worked to acquire was consistent with what I had believed since childhood about the freedom of others to discover their own paths.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Mountain Hermit offered a way to step away from that authority without stepping away from the world. I could share observations and explore ideas without attaching an instruction to them, and without the weight of my personal presence influencing how they were received. I wasn’t looking to create followers or convince people to adopt my perspective. I wanted to give them the opportunity to consider something differently and decide for themselves what, if anything, it meant to them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That desire went back much further than my professional life. Since grade school, I’d believed that people should have the freedom to leave unsafe situations and have somewhere safe to go, to be different without facing harassment, to pursue interests and ambitions of their own choosing, and to question decisions being imposed upon them. Just as importantly, they should have the freedom to follow the thoughts in their own minds and explore wherever those thoughts might lead, rather than being directed along a path someone else had chosen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Over time, I’ve come to recognize how closely those freedoms are connected. The ability to choose means little if the only choices available are those someone else has placed within the walls around us. And while we may learn to recognize the walls imposed by others, we often construct our own boundaries to make life within those enclosures manageable. Eventually, those adaptations can become so familiar that we stop questioning whether the limitations we’ve accepted are necessary at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A Different Lens<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
When I begin a new project, it generally grows from observation. Something happening in the world catches my attention, and I begin connecting it with things I’ve seen before, read about, experienced, or wondered about. Sometimes those observations accumulate for months or years before they take recognizable form. Other times, a single event brings several previously unrelated ideas together. The result might be a novel, an essay, a research paper, a documentary, or a proposal for changing how a system operates. The form depends on what I’m exploring and how I believe the questions might best be presented.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What remains consistent is the hope behind the work. I want to offer people another lens through which to see the world, not because I believe my perspective is necessarily the correct one, but because looking at something familiar from an unfamiliar direction can reveal possibilities we might otherwise overlook. I don’t expect everyone to agree with my observations or interpretations, and I’m not particularly interested in having people repeat them simply because they originated with me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I want readers to be able to explore ideas without judgment or someone dictating how those ideas must be interpreted. They should be free to take the parts they support, question those they don’t, imagine futures I may never have considered, and make whatever they discover part of their own stories. That’s an important distinction in a world where so much of what we see, hear, and increasingly believe is selected, filtered, or presented by systems and institutions whose interests may have little to do with our own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ultimately, the objective isn’t to supply people with my perspective. It’s to encourage them to become less dependent on anyone else to supply their perspectives in the first place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What the Map Revealed<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
As I organized the different bodies of work, the connections became easier to recognize. The Draconim Series<\/em>, for example, explores environmental crises through stories in which young people refuse to accept that their future must be determined entirely by the decisions of previous generations. The MacIver Kids Adventures<\/em> approach questions of independence, discovery, difference, inclusion, and belonging through younger characters finding their own places in the world. Both series invite readers to consider what happens when people challenge limitations others have placed upon them, but they do so through very different stories and experiences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The novels within the Symbiosis Sequence<\/em> stand independently, yet they’re connected through their exploration of humanity’s relationships with intelligence, technology, nature, and its own creations. RePHleXions<\/em> examines creativity and personal identity in a world increasingly mediated by algorithms. The Life of Phi<\/em> and The Aberration Hypothesis<\/em> explore humanity’s place within a living planet, while Children of the Rogue<\/em> challenges assumptions about intelligence and human origins. The forthcoming A Million Smaller Things<\/em> examines what happens when countless small decisions to surrender responsibility accumulate into something far larger than anyone intended.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Much of my nonfiction and research approaches related questions from another direction. Siding 29<\/em> examines how we’ve allowed the record of human life to become something collected, enclosed, and traded, while my research into digital platforms explores how systems that appear to be ordinary commercial services can acquire influence over knowledge, legitimacy, and social behaviour. My work on data-centre infrastructure, environmental costs, and public policy asks what happens when decisions affecting entire communities are made within systems those communities have little opportunity to understand or influence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The policy resources take those questions into more practical territory. They aren’t intended to tell communities what decisions to make, but to provide information, questions, and possible frameworks that allow people to participate more meaningfully in shaping their futures. The same underlying concern with independence and opportunity that appears in a children’s adventure can therefore find a very different expression in a model municipal bylaw or a public submission.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And then there are the films, podcasts, poetry, photography, and personal reflections, which remind me that not every exploration needs to begin with a problem or end with a proposed solution. Sometimes there is value in simply observing the natural world, examining a relationship, remembering an experience, or following an idea because curiosity has taken hold. The mind map doesn’t suggest that all these works share one message, only that they have grown from a connected way of observing and questioning the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the more interesting parts of creating the map was deciding which connections to show. There were obvious relationships between individual books and research projects, but there were others that only became apparent as I worked through the subjects, themes, and questions behind them. Some relationships were direct, while others existed only because two very different projects approached a similar issue from opposite directions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I also had to decide what to leave out. Some earlier work is no longer in print, while other projects are still developing. Including everything I’ve ever written or investigated would have produced something closer to a bibliography than an invitation to explore. Even the photographs required choices. The environmental fiction sits alongside waterfalls and forests, the children’s adventures beside an image representing inclusion, the nonfiction and policy work alongside communities and technological infrastructure, and the research and thought experiments near an image of scientific observation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The finished image is therefore one interpretation of the connections between my work, not the only possible one. Someone else could arrange the same books, ideas, and projects differently and find relationships I haven’t recognized. In fact, I rather hope they do. That’s part of what makes the exercise worthwhile.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What began as a practical exercise in deciding where to direct my attention over the coming months became an opportunity to revisit why I create in the first place. I didn’t discover a new philosophy or suddenly find a common purpose that had been missing. I recognized something that had been there since childhood, expressed through different interests, experiences, and forms of work as the years passed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It also reminded me how easily we can begin following expectations without noticing that we’ve built another set of walls around ourselves. Even when we’re doing things we enjoy, it can be worth asking whether we’re still pursuing them because they matter to us, or because we’ve become accustomed to thinking they’re what we ought to be doing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The mind map won’t tell me what I should write next, and I wouldn’t want it to. It gives me a clearer view of the landscape I’ve been exploring, the paths connecting different projects, and some of the possibilities still waiting beyond the edges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And perhaps someone else looking at it will discover a connection I haven’t noticed, follow it somewhere unexpected, and make something entirely their own from what they find.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Hunter’s Moon is approaching, and soon I’ll be turning my attention back to fiction, carrying another season of observations, questions, and unfinished thoughts with me. There are still plenty of worlds to explore, and plenty of different lenses through which to see them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What began as a seasonal self-check before returning to fiction became an exploration of the connections between my books, research, art, and advocacy. The result was a visual map of a lifetime of observation, curiosity, and a simple hope: to offer others a different lens through which to see the world, without telling them what they should see.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1142,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","slim_seo":{"title":"A Different Lens: The Work and Philosophy of Lawrence Nault","description":"Explore how Lawrence Nault's fiction, research, art, and advocacy connect through a lifelong philosophy of independent thought, curiosity, and discovery.","facebook_image":"https:\/\/lawrencenault.me\/journal\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/Lawrence_Nault_Mind_Map_3000-scaled.jpg","twitter_image":"https:\/\/lawrencenault.me\/journal\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/Lawrence_Nault_Mind_Map_3000-scaled.jpg"},"footnotes":""},"categories":[321,323,326,324,325,327,322,320],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ecology","category-film","category-poetry","category-policy","category-research","category-stone-and-signal-podcast","category-technology","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lawrencenault.me\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1141","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lawrencenault.me\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lawrencenault.me\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lawrencenault.me\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lawrencenault.me\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1141"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lawrencenault.me\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1141\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1143,"href":"https:\/\/lawrencenault.me\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1141\/revisions\/1143"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lawrencenault.me\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1142"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lawrencenault.me\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lawrencenault.me\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lawrencenault.me\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}The Map Is Not the Territory<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Back to the Moon<\/h2>\n\n\n\n