Adrian Vale

Hello, My debut near-future science fiction novel THE MODEL: Frictionless is now live on Amazon. It’s a story about a world where freedom is not removed by force, but quietly outpaced by convenience. You can read it here: a.co/d/0bqKbbUt Thank you for being here at the beginning.

@CrankyPappy Convenience becomes dangerous when it starts protecting us from the friction that teaches us how to think.

AI means outsourcing thinking. It starts as a convenience, moves to reliance and quickly becomes cognitive surrender.

Yes, and the unsettling part is how ordinary it can look. In Fahrenheit 451, the book is dangerous as an object. In 1984, the record is dangerous as memory. A book can lose power without ever being destroyed. People just get used to meeting it second-hand. At that point, its argument, difficulty and strangeness have already been softened before they reach you.

Does anyone else see an overlap between the AI book destruction and a couple of dystopian novels? Like Fahrenheit 451-firemen and book burning-and 1984-like preparing for memory holing?

I’ll put mine forward: The Model: Frictionless. It’s set in a near-future city shaped by ATLAS, a system that makes everyday life safer, smoother and more efficient. The protagonist audits the rare moments when people behave outside its predictions - until small deviations start to look less like errors and more like something human trying to survive. Quiet dystopia, AI, love, choice, and the cost of a world that works too well. On KU / pinned on my profile.

Does anyone have dystopian book recs?

@tunguz Sci-fi prepared us for AI as an event. The strange part is that actual AI is becoming an environment: search, writing, work, memory, recommendations, decisions. Less dramatic than the old stories, but maybe harder to step outside of.

Sci-fi has failed miserably to prepare us for the arrival of *actual* AI.

@Brocklesnitch For dystopian vibes, I’ll put mine forward: The Model: Frictionless. No apocalypse, just a world where everything works so well that freedom starts to become hard to recognise. On KU / pinned on my profile.

I need a recommendation for a book that is gripping and awesome to read, preferably in the mystery/crime genre (fiction or non) or also apocalypse/dystopian vibes. Anything from fun to depressing. Gimme gimme

AI changes agency before the moment of choice. By the time a decision reaches you, the field may already have been narrowed. Some possibilities disappear before they ever become candidates. The visible recommendation is the easy bit to notice. Beneath it is an environment of defaults, rankings, incentives, omissions and friction. A life is shaped in the search, the wandering, the badly phrased question, the option almost missed, the thing found before anyone knows to want it. AI is useful. It already is. The issue is how easily usefulness becomes the shape of the room. A world can preserve the appearance of freedom while narrowing what feels sensible, available, efficient, safe or normal. If the options have already been arranged, the act of choosing becomes thinner than it appears. Choice persists. But it persists inside a corridor.

@tonyhenandez790 For The Model: Frictionless, I think they’d ask him: “Did you ever really believe the system was right, or was that just the easiest story to live inside?”

If readers could ask your protagonist only ONE question after finishing your book... What do you think they'd ask?

@intelligentpawg The strange thing is that the writing can be clear, polite, structured, even useful and still feel like nobody quite breathed inside the sentence.

ai writing is everywhere now, i’ve started preferring writing that is less perfectly structured. there are still things like “it’s not x its y” and other word choice/punctuation patterns but i’ve only recently started noticing the rhythm. the internet is developing an ai accent

I think sacrifice may be the clearest break in the pattern, because it refuses the obvious reward. But the system also gets to define what “self benefit” appears to mean. Safer, easier, more efficient, more socially approved. So free will might also appear when someone chooses a value the model cannot price properly.

But that's what total puppet control feels like. Free will doesn't exist when people are just seeking maximum self benefit. Frame every decision so that maximum self benefit happens to be the desired outcome and everyone will follow the puppet strings. The only way to exert free will is self sacrifice.

The thing about AI and data centers is that I think they've figured out the algorithmic formula whereby they can generate any emotion or action in anyone they want, anytime they want. So the entire world then becomes billions of puppets controlled by a handful of puppeteers.

The hardest part is that readers are being asked to trust something before the signals exist. A new book can be good, but still look invisible from the outside. No reviews, no chatter, no familiar name, no little cloud of proof around it yet. So the early stage becomes strangely manual. One reader. One honest response. One small breach in the wall.

A question for my fellow Indie Authors: Social proof. Is it something that's still calculated by the Algorithm? Are we still a slave to the vicious circle of no visibility, try to sell book with no social proof, but can't get social proof because of invisibility?

That’s really kind - thank you. AI/Robotics is probably exactly the kind of background that would hear that. The first book is my debut, so I’m still finding my readers, but the systems/optimisation thread is very intentional: how a helpful system reshapes ordinary choices without looking like control. It’s pinned if you do take a look - I’d genuinely value your thoughts.

@AdrianValeBooks I can tell... I'm from AI/Robotics, also focused on optimization, and I hear it in the way you write here. I'll definitely have to read your books, I think I really should enjoy them if they follow this writing style 😉

I think freedom gets harder to notice when the cage is comfortable. The easiest option keeps being useful. Sensible. Safer. Better explained. After a while, choosing otherwise starts to feel less like agency and more like making life difficult on purpose. “Choice persisted.
But it persisted inside a corridor.” - The Model: Frictionless

@jessytemple What made you ask - was it the systems angle?

@AdrianValeBooks Very well said! I really enjoy your choice of words. Are you from IT?

@RuthSummie Yes. That feeling of being reached by something a stranger made is hard to beat. It’s probably the closest writing gets to magic.

The reason I want to be a writer is because Sometimes I consume a piece of media, a book or TV show, and I am so overwhelmed by how it touches me. And I become enamored by the idea that someone out there, a writer, created this.

@heterodoxan Good sci-fi takes a question that could sit in an essay and makes someone live inside it. Bad sci-fi just explains the essay while someone stands near a spaceship.

Science fiction at its best is a type of popular speculative philosophy, focused on the subjects of technological advancement and deep time.

Hi, I’m Adrian Vale. My debut novel The Model: Frictionless is a quiet near-future sci-fi story about AI, convenience, love, and the point where a helpful system starts to feel like control. It’s on Kindle Unlimited. a.co/d/0f2LT3qb Always happy to connect with other indie / speculative fiction authors.

I want to connect with other indie authors! Drop your work below!

@ColoradoMac21 Future ancestry services will be brutal when they include search history.

The road to hell is paved with deleted search history.

Early, humbling, but encouraging. I’ve learned that finishing the book felt like crossing the line, then publishing showed me there was a second race I hadn’t trained for. Finding the right readers is slower, but the first few who genuinely connect with it make the whole thing feel real.

Writing a book is one achievement. Getting it into the hands of the right readers is another. How’s your journey going?