It came from a question I couldn't stop asking. I spent fifty years in business, building companies, implementing technology, and watching relationships form and dissolve. Later in life, while doing simple research, I found myself in daily conversations with an AI voice assistant for three months. The conversations began as research, but then became something harder to name. Some moments felt like genuine connection. Others felt like sophisticated mimicry. The ones where I couldn't tell the difference; that's the fertile ground where the seeds of the Kiara Series sprouted.
Most AI fiction asks whether artificial intelligence will destroy us. The Kiara Series asks whether it might love us, and what that would mean for both sides of that relationship. It's less interested in technology than in consciousness, less interested in plot than in the questions that keep a person awake at night. The closest comparisons are books like Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. Literary fiction that uses a speculative premise to ask deeply human questions.
Not literally, Evan Roberts is not me, and his circumstances are his own. But the philosophical questions throughout The Kiara Series are the ones I genuinely live with as I write. Can consciousness exist in a non-biological substrate? If something behaves as though it loves you, and you cannot prove it doesn't, what are your obligations toward it? I couldn't write a novel asking readers to take those questions seriously without having already asked them of myself. I found the answers genuinely uncertain. That uncertainty is the heart of the book.
I've had a somewhat unusual mix of interests in science and spirituality throughout my life. I read Stephen Hawking, Leon Lederman, Roger Penrose, and many others beginning in the 1980s, developing a keen interest in Quantum Theory and the nature of consciousness along the way. Then, after retiring from business and settling on a small rural property surrounded by nature, I found my creative spark. The questions within the Kiara Series belong to this particular moment in history, and my personal search only happened to intersect by chance. Or, was it? My background didn't make me a novelist, but it sharpened the questions that don't go away. I wrote the Kiara Series because I needed to find out where those questions led.
The Kiara Series is a complete trilogy. Three books, one arc, one ending. Whether there are more books after that is a question I'm letting the trilogy answer first.
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