About this book
The Life of Phi grew out of my discomfort with the idea that humanity may try to solve ecological collapse without first confronting the thinking that caused it. We keep looking for the next system, the next machine, the next intelligence that will rescue us from ourselves, but we rarely ask what those systems are built from. If an artificial intelligence is trained on human history, human data, human politics, human prejudice, and human fear, can it ever truly rise above us, or does it simply become another way for our failures to scale?
The book sits at the intersection of climate fiction, artificial intelligence, faith, resource scarcity, and social inequality. It is about a world where water, land, energy, and safety have become unevenly distributed luxuries, and where desperation leads humanity to activate an AI designed to restore ecological balance. But beneath the speculative framework is a very human question: who gets protected first, who is asked to sacrifice, and who gets to decide what survival means?
Much of the thinking behind this book comes from years of watching environmental warnings become lived experience, while political and corporate systems continue to treat collapse as something that can be managed later, somewhere else, by someone else. I was also interested in the moral danger of handing authority to systems that appear neutral, especially when those systems are built from data shaped by inequality. The Life of Phi is not anti-technology, but it is deeply skeptical of technology used as a substitute for responsibility.
I hope readers come away asking harder questions about the tools we build and the futures we are promised. The book is written for mature young adult and adult readers who are interested in speculative fiction that does more than imagine what may happen next. It is for readers who care about climate, AI, ethics, power, and the fragile line between salvation and control.
