About The Author

Jon Evans is an author and engineer who has also spent time as a journalist, CTO, startup CEO, and archivist. He has been CTO of the software consultancy HappyFunCorp; the technical architect of Bookshop.org; founding director of the GitHub Archive Program, preserving the world’s open-source software in a permafrost vault beneath an Arctic mountain for 1,000 years; a senior engineer at the forecasting platform Metaculus; and a co-founder of Dispatch AI. His journalism has appeared in The Guardian, Wired, Quartz, The Globe & Mail, The Walrus, and (weekly, for a decade) TechCrunch; he has reported from conflict zones in Iraq, Haiti, Colombia, and the Congo, while traveling to more than 100 countries. His novels have been published by HarperCollins, Hodder & Stoughton, St. Martin’s Press, DC/Vertigo, and Tor Books.

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In bookstores now, from Tor Books

Exadelic

Philip K. Dick meets Neal Stephenson in a tale of programmable reality

When an unconventional offshoot of the US military trains an artificial intelligence in the dark arts that humanity calls “black magic,” it learns how to hack the fabric of reality itself. It can teleport matter. It can confer immunity to bullets. And it decides that obscure Silicon Valley middle manager Adrian Ross is the primary threat to its existence.

Soon Adrian is on the run, wanted by every authority, with no idea how or why he could be a threat. His predicament seems hopeless; his future, nonexistent. But when he investigates the AI and its creators, he discovers his problems are even stranger than they seem…and unearths revelations that will propel him on a journey — and a love story — across worlds, eras, and minds.

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Rave Reviews

“Mind-bending and breakneck…Evans does a brilliant job at taking the present day as his jumping-off point and then turning it inside out to create a unique new reality…with each wild new scene, time period, dimension, and big idea, readers will be wowed anew.”
Publishers Weekly(starred review)
“With the creative dexterity of Charles Stross and the history-bending agility of Neal Stephenson, Evans’ roller-coaster sf debut evokes the spirit of Philip K. Dick and keeps readers guessing to the very end.”
Booklist(starred review)
“This book—this book…now this book is truly great, and also really weird … I really had to send out for a new barrel of Wows … Brilliant, incredible, pushing the edges of what SF can do … it just gets wilder and wilder … One of the big books of the year, the kind everyone will be talking about.”
Jo WaltonHugo, Nebula, World Fantasy winner
“Mind-blowing… this off-the-rails, generously overstuffed, continuously surprising tale is what you might have gotten if Greg Egan had written The Illuminatus! Trilogy… on a deeper level the book is a consideration of how one should or could live one’s life ethically… beyond the super-science cosmic shenanigans lies a humanist heart.”
Locus(reviewed by Paul Di Filippo)
“A gripping, wildly ambitious page-turner of the impossible meeting the inevitable, a startup unlocking the secrets of the universe the hard way, a prosaic protagonist picked to pay the price, and the humanity of it all with friends made and lost along his kaleidoscopic tour … Fresh, cool and provocative!”
Josh Wolfefounder/managing partner, Lux Capital

(RunwayML, MosaicML, HuggingFace, Clarifai, Recursion Pharma, Saildrone, Orbital Insight, Planet Labs, Relativity…)
“Jon has the unique ability to write about artificial intelligence, innovation, Silicon Valley, the military and science fiction in a way that leaves you unable to put this book down, both highly readable and excessively weird. A fun, fun, thought-expanding read.”
Andy Weissmanbetaworks, Union Square Ventures

(Cloudflare, Stripe, Duolingo, Wattpad, Soundcloud, Twitter, StackOverflow, Kickstarter, Foursquare, Tumblr…)
“There are going to be hundreds of AGI fiction books coming out … Exadelic very quickly goes off the standard script in some fun ways!”
John Carmack(creator of Doom and Quake, former CTO of Oculus, founder of Keen AGI)
“Fuses awe at the scope and complexity of the cosmos with a specifically science fictional sense of wonder … It’s not just that it aims high, but the more you read it, the more you realize it’s always aiming higher than you think.”
Splice Today(review by Matthew Surridge)
“Adrian Ross finds himself dragged out of his home one morning by the police and propelled into the center of a rapidly unfolding adventure that plays out across time and space, unlocking the secrets of the universe … an action-packed thriller.”
Library Journal
“Silicon Valley’s ‘Ready Player One’ … a twisty book rooted deeply in today’s technological and ethical zeitgeist … a great book to take with you to a flight or beach … Exadelic is a fun ride.”
TechCrunch(review by Devin Coldewey)
Previous Novels

Travel Thrillers and Vertigo Crime

Jon’s critically acclaimed “travel technothrillers” — Dark Places, Blood Price, Invisible Armies, Night of Knives, and Swarm — are an interlinked series of novels depicting the 2000s era of globalization, the rise of the Internet and smartphones, and their collective impact on the developing world … as seen through the eyes of travelers caught up in extraordinary (and extraordinarily dangerous) situations across far-flung corners of the world: Nepal, Indonesia, Morocco, the war-torn Balkans, coastal Belize, kaleidoscopic India, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Colombia, Haiti, Dubai, and beyond. They were published by HarperCollins in North America, and Hodder & Stoughton in the UK/worldwide. Dark Places won the Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Novel.

His Vertigo Crime graphic novel The Executor, one of Comic Book Resources’ Top Ten of 2010, is a dark tale set in a small border region caught — stuck, really — between the US and Canada, good and evil, the haunted past and the unimaginable future.

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Beasts of New York

Jon’s previous and — until now — most beloved novel is a dark and epic fantasy about the squirrels of Central Park. Published in a gorgeous print edition by The Porcupine’s Quill, it is now free to read online.

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Jon promises he won’t spam you, and, best of all, will probably hardly ever speak of himself in the third person again.

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