THE PEOPLE IN THE BOX: Preface

A serialized novel about a world without consciousness and the recovery of our humanity. Plus: Why am I, an anonymous nobody, publishing my novel on Substack?

Sophia Black is soulless. At least, that’s how people interpret the discovery that one in three people lacks consciousness. Behaviorally, these “Somatics” are identical to everyone else—but, inside, there is simply no one home.

Such is the premise of THE PEOPLE IN THE BOX, a serialized science-fiction novel I will be publishing anonymously on Substack. The journey here has been long and arduous. I began working on the novel in early 2022, inspired by the thought experiment of the philosophical zombie. I was reading a book by the panpsychist Philip Goff, and the premise leapt into my skull like a bolt from the blue: What would happen to a society that discovers one-third of its population are philosophical zombies? (Don’t worry, I never use that term in the novel.)

From there, I started developing characters and histories, slowly crafting a world that’s falling apart at the seams. The economy is buckling. Everyone is paranoid. Cities and states are declaring sovereignty. New cults and religions are emerging to placate or prey upon the millions of broken souls wandering a United States in the grips of a spiritual crisis, and tech behemoths are capitalizing on the technology behind all of it—a mysterious, yet profitable device called an “ontiscope.”

Amidst the strife is Sophia Black, a so-called “Somatic” who’s become estranged from her ex-husband and two children. After a senseless act of violence hits close to home, Sophia resolves to cross the country in search of her family, hoping to prove to herself and others that the love she holds is no illusion. Her destination: the White Mountains of New Hampshire, where her son Sam leads a mysterious commune called the First Family, which, in the words of their leader, “does not divide.”

I finished THE PEOPLE IN THE BOX in late 2023. To my surprise, I was quickly able to secure representation from one of the top literary agencies in the country. We shipped it out to publishers in spring of 2024, and I thought I was on my way to the literary stratosphere.

But then… crickets.

Days became weeks, weeks became months, rejections poured in, and eventually, after a year on submission, I had to accept that my book was not going to sell.

One can only speculate why, but the length certainly did it no favors. 120,000 words is about the absolute limit any publisher will accept from a debut novelist. The subject matter—dark, heady, dense, conceptual—was also a tough sell. To quote one editor’s rejection letter: “This was quite dark for my taste.”

Several editors cited the voice, too. The novel is written in a cryptic, neobiblical tone that will no doubt turn off some. (A friend from my writing group used the word “incantatory.”) One editor had this to say about the voice:

“I think [Anonymous] is a great writer, and there is so much here to like—especially the genre-blurring concept—but I didn’t quite fall in love. I didn’t connect with the voice the way I was hoping and it kept me from fully engaging with the story.”

And another:

“It's intelligent, gripping, and quite ambitious in the world-building and its allegorical implications. I'm afraid in the end it felt to me too squarely in the genre—not that it doesn't work quite well on its own terms, but I worried I couldn't quite hear the voice beyond or beneath the concept, if that makes sense?”

Does it? I suppose so. But I am an artist who believes in their art, and the voice is something I have to stand by. I am one of those readers who is quickly bored by the kind of flat, insipid prose so common to contemporary fiction. More than that, I wanted to inflect the voice, stewed as it is in spiritual upheaval, with a mythic character befitting of the world it describes. Some editors seemed to agree with me, even in their rejections:

“[Anonymous] has an interesting voice, and a great resume."

Others were even on the verge of accepting:

“The premise is intriguing: what is the nature of consciousness? What happens when a person’s interiority becomes legislated? There are elements that really pulled me in: the realistic portrayal of public outcry; the conflicting ideas of what it means to ‘experience life’ as opposed to not, the ablism of society in defining normalcy. Admittedly, I’m not actively looking for dystopian fiction right now, though I read and enjoyed much of this.”

I preamble this essay with rejections in the spirit of openness and experimentation. I’m humble enough to admit these editors may be onto something. Maybe the voice really was this novel’s undoing. But maybe not. I received a grand total of 9 rejections before this novel was considered dead, this being the nature of manuscript submissions these days. (Many more simply ghosted the book.) That’s not a very large sample set, even if the gatekeepers are well schooled in their market, which brings me to my reason for publishing the novel here.

Substack seems like an interesting way to evaluate the evaluators. I know a lot of readers, including myself, dislike reading fiction on a bright screen, and while I would not rule out self-publishing a print edition, access here is, at least theoretically, more networked than Kindle Direct. There’s also a certain appeal to serializing the book as was popular in the Victorian era. What’s old is new again, and all that.

A lot of hay has been made about Substack as an alternative publishing model, and some of it is quite encouraging. Naomi Kanakia’s self-published Substack novella received favorable acclaim from The New Yorker. Recently, she likened this space to an open mic night. John Pistelli’s serialized novel Major Arcana earned big ups from Ross Barkan, who called it the great American novel. (Pistelli eventually found a print publisher thanks to this acclaim.) Barkan’s recently launched Metropolitan Review is very bullish on Substack as a platform for the new literature. In only a few months, it soared to over 22,000 subscribers. Sam Kahn and The Republic of Letters have begun reviewing recently published short stories, a much needed critical project that aims to rejuvenate a dying format. Regarding renewed interest in the classics, Henry Oliver was perhaps the most bullish when he wrote, “Literature is so back!”

But there are reasons to be bearish. A literacy crisis has us word scoundrels clutching pearls and shipping clicks to New York Magazine for an endless feed of stories about illiterate college students and the end of reading. Are these fears warranted? Immersed within a media apparatus that incentivizes fear, pessimism, and hot takes, it’s hard to say for sure. The weekly bulletins questioning whether white men are receiving enough accommodations from the publishing world should well demonstrate that the discourse is not in lockstep with ground truth. The question of “gatekeeping”—who keeps the gate and where—haunts every conversation with conspiratorial intrigue, and one is reminded of Baudrillard’s “desert of the real”—a literary landscape defined by spectacle, simulation, and mere symbols of cultural exchange. The state of literature simply cannot escape the confines of our governing exchange, the internet.

Whatever your preferred medium, print or digital, I remain cautiously optimistic. I owe much of that hope to the short story reading group I have been hosting in person since 2019. Guests come from all walks of literary life and reading experience, with some surprised to learn that short stories are not just a relic of the bygone literature you were forced to read in high school. The group is open to the public, and many times I have had to impose a waiting list on those wishing to attend. The popularity and, more importantly, the vibrant discussions of this group lead me to believe that online discourse, with its endless doomsaying, is quite divorced from reality. There remains a deep yearning for a literature that is accessible but challenging, fresh but authentic, popular but eminent. I am inspired by Ross Barkan’s analysis of the mesoculture—an ethos that combines the egalitarian free-for-all of the user-made internet with the capital resources of traditional publishing. I think some melding of these two could soften the edges and defects of each. Does Substack follow in the spirit of the mesoculture? Hard to say. I approach this experiment from the very, very bottom rung of the content ladder. I have no following, no connections, and little knack for marketing or self-promotion. To throw another obstacle onto the pile, I am writing anonymously.

But the times they are a-changing. I’m inclined to believe, like Ted Gioia, that we are destined for some kind of neo-Romantic revival. The culture’s attitude toward technology, particularly those who peddle it, might best be described as fatigued. AI threatens to reshape a fragile literary landscape, as these insatiable plagiarism machines continue to crunch, quantify, and automate the last vestiges of the digital humanities with reckless abandon. We are told by the Sam Altmans of the world that the human function in art, expression, and creativity is incidental, that the product, the work of art—the aesthetic object—is the only thing that matters. Its creation—the subjective act of inspiration—is merely a compute problem. One imagines, not unlike the dead internet theory, a future of disembodied philosophical zombies—millions of unthinking consumers, gradually digested into a single, unseeing object with no subject to behold it. It should come as no surprise that the eschatology of Silicon Valley is meant to reassure us. That AI will replace humanity is irrelevant to the question of whether that AI retains the core subjectivity or “being” necessary to experience it. We call that consciousness. Theologists call it soul or spirit. Indian philosophers call it awareness or “pure consciousness.” We can’t even agree on what “it” is, and yet there are those who believe it is merely incidental to creativity. Are we to believe these AI-eschatologists are the rationally minded objective materialists they say they are?

In THE PEOPLE IN THE BOX, a fringe prophecy holds that consciousness is in a process of generational depletion, slowly being siphoned off of human existence (sort of like the bicameral mind but in reverse). Eventually, the prophesy holds, the last conscious being—"the last Ontic”—will be born and die. In doing so, he or she will reseed the cosmos with the light of experience once more, slowly proliferating to the far reaches of the universe.

When I first came up with the idea I thought it was just a fun little anecdote that suited the dismal world of the novel. I see now that it is, at least metaphorically, not far off from the future we are rushing towards. As I worked my way through draft after draft, revision after revision, I came to see the true meaning of THE PEOPLE IN THE BOX as a tale of love, life, beauty, and staggering ugliness in contention over the true purpose of our being. This is a world that is heartbreakingly bleak but maddeningly similar to our own. I hope to share it with you in a spirit of openness, curiosity, and generosity.

Do not feel obligated to become a paid subscriber. Every tier will have full access to the novel. I merely hope to share a work of art with you that, despite failing to find a publisher, I am still quite proud of. My plan is to publish one chapter a week. I hope you enjoy it.

Thanks for reading.

- Eponynonymous