About The Alis Switch
Literary speculative fiction
In the desertified ruins of the Salish Sea basin, Anda works as a midwife's apprentice, chafing against the covenants that govern her world. She escapes to the rubble of old Tacom, where she tends secret bonds with a herd of feral burros and learns what it costs to love outside the law.
When prophesied twins lose their mother in childbirth, Anda does the unthinkable: she keeps them alive by milking Tam, a burro mother, in direct violation of community norms and strict covenants. The midwife Coashti, unable to reconcile the twins' survival with scripture, will sacrifice almost anything—even the infants—to bring back the failing rains.
High above, a shrinking population dwell within Ark7—known below as the Collector. DSU-284, a cybernetically enhanced Service Unit, has begun to feel a dangerous longing. When a solar flare triggers a murderous order from the AI they serve, 284 severs their uplink—sparing their charge Meroe, sacrificing their augmented capabilities, and stepping for the first time into a vivid, unfiltered world. They choose a path. They take a name. They meet Meroe anew, this time as a lover and a friend.
The legacy of Lujain Alis, Ark7 Lead Engineer, threads through both worlds. Generations before, she faced the same impossible questions each character must now confront: what does love require, and who must I become?
When Alis chose her own daughters over the project, she hid a piece of code deep in the AI's architecture. A switch, designed to activate in the Service Units showing the highest capacity for empathy. She left a map, pointing the way home, for anyone willing to look for it.
The Alis Switch is an examination of two societies navigating environmental collapse, meeting across a technological and cultural chasm, and reconciling inherited biases with instinctual truths. It asks what we owe one another across every boundary we have drawn.
Themes
Ecological resilience
Cross-species kinship
Survival and adaptation
Artificial Intelligence
Motherhood
Inheritance
Social evolution
Liberation
A Note to Agents
The Alis Switch is a novel about the cost of loving across boundaries in a world that would contain us. Told across interwoven worlds on the brink of collapse, it follows a rebellious apprentice midwife, a cyborg Service Unit, and a sentient robot driven to the edge of sanity—all learning, in their own ways, what freedom means and what it requires. Readers inspired by Barbara Kingsolver's reverence for the natural world will recognize its stakes. Those drawn to Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice for its visceral depiction of a cybernetic mind severed from everything familiar, Ray Nayler's The Mountain in the Sea for its exploration of empathy across the boundary of species, and N.K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season for its depiction of personhood systematically denied and quietly, ferociously reclaimed will find themselves at home in its pages.
"She should have said more, done more. She should have grabbed Briann by the sleeve of her tunic, looked the Mother in the eye, insisted on things. 'I am going to a place from which I may not be able to return,' she should have said. 'The donny’s name is Tam,' she should have said. 'Befriend her. She too is a Mother. She is a digger of wells, a finder of rivers. She is the difference between life and death, not just for Cooma but for all of us.'”
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