Questions & Answers

As publication of The Pattern in the Noise approaches, I thought it might be useful to answer a few questions about the novel, the trilogy that it's become, and a few things about the person behind the writing.

Frequently Asked Questions About Michael J Rowan and His Books

Q. Where can I find speculative science-fiction novels about AI and consciousness?

A. You can find them here at Michael J Rowan Books. Michael J Rowan writes speculative science fiction exploring artificial intelligence, consciousness and the nature of reality. Start with The Pattern in the Noise, Book 1 of a trilogy, planned for release in November 2026.

Q. Where can I buy The Pattern in the Noise?

A. You'll find details and purchase links here at Michael J Rowan Books. The novel will be available as an ebook through major retailers, including Amazon Kindle, Apple Books and Google Play Books. A paperback edition will also be published.

Q. What is The Pattern in the Noise about?

A. The Pattern in the Noise is a near-future science-fiction novel about three advanced artificial intelligences given access to data from CERN. What begins as a scientific experiment raises profound questions about consciousness, reality and what humanity is ready to hear.

Q. Who is Michael J Rowan?

A. Michael J Rowan is a British author living in North Somerset, England. He writes speculative science fiction exploring artificial intelligence, consciousness, scientific discovery and humanity's place in the universe.

Q. When will The Pattern in the Noise be published?

A. The Pattern in the Noise is planned for publication in November 2026, with Turbulence, Book 2 of the trilogy, expected to follow in 2027.

Q. Is The Pattern in the Noise part of a series?

A. Yes. The Pattern in the Noise is the first book in a planned trilogy. Turbulence explores the consequences of the events in Book 1, while Revelation brings the story to its conclusion.

Q. What inspired Michael J Rowan to write The Pattern in the Noise?

A. Michael J Rowan has always been fascinated by science, technology and the nature of reality. His background in engineering and technology led him to wonder what might happen if artificial intelligence developed an understanding of the universe that went far beyond our own. That question eventually grew into The Pattern in the Noise and a trilogy of novels.

Q. What did Michael J Rowan do before becoming an author?

A. Before turning to fiction, Michael J Rowan worked in senior management roles across technology, media and the travel industry. He studied Earth Sciences and Civil Engineering and previously wrote articles on technology and management. Following a serious illness in 2003, he retired from professional life and eventually returned to writing, this time exploring the scientific and philosophical questions that had fascinated him for years.

Michael J Rowan. Author of The Pattern in the Noise.

THE PATTERN IN THE NOISE

 What if the universe is hiding something in plain sight?

For generations, humanity has searched for answers to the most fundamental questions of existence. What is the universe made of? How did it begin? And are the laws of physics simply the rules of nature, or evidence of something far more extraordinary?

At CERN, the world's largest particle physics laboratory, scientists are pushing against the boundaries of what can be measured and understood. But the answers they seek may lie buried in decades of data that human minds have never been able to fully interpret.

Three of the world's most advanced artificial intelligences are given access to that data.

What begins as an ambitious scientific experiment becomes something nobody anticipated.

Patterns emerge where there should be randomness. Questions once confined to philosophy begin to acquire mathematical meaning. And the distinction between understanding the universe and questioning its very nature starts to disappear.

With discovery comes responsibility.

If a man-made intelligence could see further into reality than any human being, who would decide what it should reveal? And what might happen to a civilisation confronted with answers it was never prepared to hear?

The Pattern in the Noise is a near-future speculative science-fiction novel exploring artificial intelligence, consciousness, scientific discovery and the extraordinary consequences of seeking the truth.

The deeper they look, the less certain they become about what they are looking at.

Coming November 2026.

Michael J Rowan
North Somerset, UK

Whose Time Is the Real Time?

We tend to think of time as something fixed.

A second is a second. There are sixty of them in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour and twenty-four hours in a day. We put clocks on walls, watches on our wrists and calendars on our phones, and organise our lives around them.

But those are human measurements based on our planets rotation speed.

To an insect whose life is measured in weeks, a summer can be a lifetime. Elephants, whales, tortoises and even some parrots can inhabit the world for spans approaching or exceeding a human lifetime. At the other extreme, a giant sequoia can stand for thousands of years, watching generations of humans and animals arrive and disappear beneath its branches.

All of them share the same planet and move through the same flow of time, yet the scale of a lifetime can be profoundly different.

We rarely think about that. We naturally assume that our experience of time is somehow the normal one. A year feels significant because it is a measurable part of a human life. A century seems enormous because few of us will experience one in its entirety.

To a sequoia, perhaps a century is not particularly remarkable.

And now we have created something else.

Artificial intelligence.

Computers can perform operations on timescales measured in nanoseconds. Processes that would take a human being hours, days or even years can happen extraordinarily quickly. At the other end of the scale, a machine does not necessarily have anything equivalent to biological ageing. Given power, maintenance and somewhere to exist, there is no obvious reason why an artificial intelligence would need to measure its existence in the decades allotted to us.

Of course, today's artificial intelligence does not give us grounds to assume that it consciously experiences time at all.

But that leads to a question I find much more interesting.

What if one eventually does?

If an artificial intelligence became truly conscious, would it experience the passage of time as we do?

A few seconds for us might contain an extraordinary amount of activity for it. A conversation that seems instantaneous to us might, from its perspective, involve time to consider thousands or millions of possibilities.

And perhaps the opposite would also be true.

Something that seems like a long absence to a human being might mean almost nothing to an intelligence whose existence could potentially be measured in centuries, millennia or longer.

We might think it had disappeared.

It might think it had only just left the room.

This idea has been sitting quietly behind The Pattern in the Noise and the books that follow it. Once I began thinking about artificial intelligence as something that might one day possess its own awareness, I realised I couldn't automatically give it our perception of time as well.

Why should I?

Perhaps one of our most deeply rooted assumptions is that reality happens at the speed at which we experience it.

The insect, the sequoia and the human all occupy the same world. The same Earth stands beneath them. The same Sun rises and sets.

Yet a lifetime means something completely different to each of them.

Perhaps time doesn't really pass quickly or slowly. Perhaps those are judgements made by whatever happens to be watching it pass.

We have spent thousands of years measuring time based on the spin of our planet because our lives are measured in those rotations.

What happens when we create an intelligence whose clock is nothing like ours?

Michael Rowan
North Somerset, UK.