{"product_id":"archipelago-of-light","title":"Archipelago of Light","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eArchipelago of Light is a hard science fiction thriller set in a civilizational context from 2003 to 2039. It follows seven main characters through the downfall of the liberal order amid Artificial Intelligence, authoritarianism, and the Anthropocene.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe story unfolds across worlds of cage fights, intelligence work, and platform capitalism. Kaspar Locke, a tech visionary, and Butch Calloway, an engineer who thinks through his body, forge a bond in Moscow that will influence decades ahead. When Russian operatives kill a British scholar, his widow, Victoria Caldwell, is radicalized from an MI6 analyst into an active participant. In Caracas, a teenage trafficking survivor named Sofia Morales builds a criminal empire driven by synesthetic perception and memories of the dead. In Kenya, a child soldier named John Mwangi discovers epigenetic triggers for a mirror neuron disorder that allow him to feel human emotions like the weather. In a refugee camp, a Syrian girl named Reem al-Jabri receives a tablet that will become the foundation of a new civilization. In China, Zhao Meilin is a patriot who controls others while being controlled herself.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eAs rule-of-law institutions weaken and authoritarians consolidate power, these characters develop competing systems for organizing human life: CoralNet, a distributed mesh network based on children's biometrics; the Memory Churches, where AI brings the dead back to life as both religion and intelligence tool; and China's Harmony, which rewrites dissent at the neurochemical level. The novel's deepest tension lies between humanity's tools and its shared fictions — techne and daemons — now dangerously out of sync.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe story reaches a climax in worldwide wars that require new forms of superintelligence spanning multi-agent AI civilizations, whales, and forests. In a world where augmented reality and artificial intelligence fracture perception itself, the question is no longer who holds power but whether civilization has enough shared truth left to survive.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Partners Media Publishing","offers":[{"title":"Hardback","offer_id":53545440510225,"sku":"9798991473576","price":27.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0928\/6890\/3185\/files\/cover_8010904c-c754-493b-acb3-3e4af52416f1.jpeg?v=1779195680","url":"https:\/\/www.stablebookgroup.com\/products\/archipelago-of-light","provider":"Stable Book Group","version":"1.0","type":"link"}