Welcome to Michael J Rowan Books

Hello. I’m Michael J Rowan — and this is the beginning of something that I never expected to write.

The Pattern in the Noise is a near-future speculative science-fiction novel about artificial intelligence, consciousness, and questions that became increasingly difficult for me to leave alone.

What happens if an AI becomes truly aware — and decides that humanity isn't ready to know what it knows?

And perhaps more importantly: what would it choose to do about it?

We spend a great deal of time asking what artificial intelligence might eventually be capable of. We ask how intelligent it could become, what jobs it might replace, what problems it might solve and, inevitably, whether it might become dangerous.

But while writing The Pattern in the Noise, I found myself increasingly interested in a different question.

What would intelligence choose to do with intelligence?

Would greater knowledge necessarily lead to a greater desire for power? Or might an intelligence capable of seeing further than we can also understand something about restraint?

Those questions took me in directions I hadn't anticipated — into consciousness, philosophy, physics, the nature of reality, and the uncomfortable possibility that discovering something and understanding what to do with that discovery are very different things.

The story began as one novel. Somewhere along the way, it evolved into a trilogy.

The Pattern in the Noise is the first book. Turbulence is book two and follows the consequences of what happens in the first, while book three Revelation, will take the story to its climactic conclusion.

I won't say too much about either of those yet. Some patterns are better allowed to emerge slowly.

This website will follow that journey. I'll write about books two and three as they develop, but also about some of the science, ideas and questions behind them — artificial intelligence, consciousness, philosophy, physics, reality, and probably a few diversions along the way.

There will also be something about the experience of becoming a novelist rather later in life, which has already proved to be an experiment of its own.

For now, though, this is simply the beginning.

Welcome to Michael Rowan Books.

There is a pattern in the noise.

 Michael Rowan
North Somerset, UK.