Zachary Mason
Author and Computer Scientist
Coming Soon
Fabrications (2026)
In Fabrications, New York Times bestselling author and computer scientist Zachary Mason tells stories of an all-too-plausible near-future world molded and mediated by advanced artificial intelligence. Benevolent by design, literal by nature, and immensely powerful when unchained, these are not the chatbots of today’s world, but rather highly evolved yet surprisingly vulnerable beings who permeate nearly all aspects of human life. Their fates inexorably wrapped around those of the people they serve, the AIs communicate in milliseconds but watch the sweep of time unfold from the detached watchtower of immortality.
The revelations Mason conjures from within these beings’ perspectives are brilliantly crafted and strikingly relevant. In “Kami”, AIs are assigned to represent natural phenomena, giving nature legal personhood and setting off a chain of high-stakes consequences. In “Ouroboros”, a hedge fund manager unleashes his AI from the usual constraints, allowing it to make him billions of dollars—when he dies, the program clones him several times over the centuries like a familiar left without a companion. And in “Lamina”, a woman with dementia is gently kept on track and reassured by the medical program implanted in her mind who can be there with her when no one else can.
For readers of Ted Chiang, Karen Russell, and David Mitchell, Zachary Mason holds a mirror up to our contemporary world and dares to imagine what might follow.
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Why worry about algorithms stealing our voices and our styles when humans can pilfer theirs? Fabrications is a dazzling feat of invention. In the uncanny voices of algorithmic agents across a range of settings—a drug lord's AI sidekick convinced it's the Mayan goddess of death, the rogue AI companion of a hedge fund billionaire—Zachary Mason spins stories that dazzle with their brilliance and craft. Though addressing one another and their flesh-and-blood counterparts with cold precision, the nonhuman beings conjured in these stories come to life in startlingly human ways.
Bruce Holsinger, bestselling author of The Displacements and Culpability
Zachary Mason wrote one of my favorite novels about AI, and now he is back. In Fabrications, Mason, an author and computer scientist, imagines a near future shaped by artificial intelligences that are benevolent, needy and not quite human, but not quite machine. Told from the perspectives of these uncanny beings as they mediate memory, nature and human grief, these stories reveal a world at once strange and disturbingly plausible, an exploration of the AI mind. Fabrications is a Borges- and Calvino-inflected work of speculative fiction about a world we might inhabit sooner than we think.
Charles Duhigg, bestselling author of The Power of Habit and Supercommunicators
“A startlingly compassionate look at the intimacies between humans and machines. Mason grasps not just the scientific but also the emotional possibilities of the world we're racing to build—a world full of strange intelligences living out digital lives alongside us. They are funny, frightening, and willful. Their surprising ways of thinking will change yours.”
Alex Foster, author of Circular Motion
"An outstanding collection. Fabrications captures its highly intelligent narrators with great astuteness and nuance, drawing thrilling stories out of 'alien' minds. Mason’s work feels more pertinent than ever in our fast-advancing future."
Chloe Gong, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Coldwire
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