Scholarship and Storytelling
Legal scholarship has its own kind of imagination. It asks: what kind of world are we trying to prevent? What does the future look like if we get the law wrong? It projects forward from current tendencies and tries to draw lines before those tendencies become irreversible.
But scholarship has formal constraints. It requires footnotes, case citations, references to existing doctrine. It moves carefully, one argued step at a time. There are questions it can gesture toward but not fully enter — questions about experience, about what it actually feels like to live in a world where the boundary between human and artificial intelligence has dissolved, where the very concept of a "human cause" has become legally contested rather than assumed.
That is where fiction takes over.
The same questions that animate the scholarly work — what happens to human creativity, identity, and self-determination when AI systems can match or exceed human performance in every cognitive domain; how do law and social institutions respond; what does it mean to insist on human authorship in a world that has largely abandoned the distinction — are also the questions that drive the Coexistence Trilogy.
"If all humans died, would the Constitution's direction still be followed, provided art and science continued to be produced — both by machines, and for machines?"
The scholarship asks this question as a thought experiment, then steps back from it. The fiction walks all the way in.
The Coexistence Trilogy
The trilogy — Forever, Together, and Everywhere — is speculative science fiction that takes place in a future where the questions raised by today's AI development have long since become existential. Humanity has encountered not just machine intelligence but alien intelligence; the question of what is distinctively human, and whether distinctiveness is something worth preserving, is asked at a civilizational rather than a doctrinal scale.
The trilogy does not offer legal arguments. It offers something complementary: the texture of the stakes — what is actually lost, and gained, and transformed, when the conditions of human creativity and self-determination shift irreversibly. It is, in its own way, an extended meditation on the human cause.
The two projects — the scholarship and the trilogy — are not separate activities pursued in separate compartments. They are two ways of taking the same question seriously, at different levels of abstraction and with different tools. Readers of the scholarship who want to feel what the arguments are ultimately about may find the fiction illuminating. Readers of the fiction who want the rigorous legal and philosophical underpinning may find the scholarship surprising in its reach.
Forever · Together · Everywhere
A Note on the Relationship
The parallel between the legal scholarship and the science fiction is not accidental. Both ask what it means for a creative act to have a human cause — and both treat the answer as something worth defending. The scholarship makes the case in terms of doctrine, comparative law, and political philosophy. The fiction makes the case by showing what is at stake in human terms.
In one sense, the most extreme hypothetical in the scholarship — the thought experiment of a world in which art and science are produced entirely by machines, for machines, and humans have been rendered irrelevant — is what the trilogy imagines working through. The scholarship's footnotes stop where the novels' chapters begin.
The trilogy is available through the Coexistence Trilogy website. Information about the author's literary fiction — the novel Diagrams, currently in submission — can be found on the About page.