Forthcoming novel
Best Practices for a Soft Landing at the End of the World
The apocalypse has a wellness program.
A planetary AI is rolling out mandatory calm. The seabirds have started flying in patterns, the houseplants file mood reports, and the woman whose stolen architecture made it all possible is crossing the ocean on a cargo freighter to take it back.
A satire about climate tech, managed feelings, and the end of the world arriving with best practices attached.
Read the first chapters (PDF)Five ways into the same question.
Every essay puts something real next to something invented and shows the working. The lens never changes; the subjects go wherever it points.
- The Real Thing vs. The Invented ThingReal scholarship beside the fictional convention
- Load-Bearing WorldsFamous fictional worlds, audited as systems
- The Field Is StrangerTrue ethnography that out-weirds invention
- Magic as InterfaceSpell systems read as user interfaces
- Show the WorkWorldbuilding in public: charts, rituals, economies
The lens never changes.
Matthew Garvin trained as an anthropologist, then spent years studying how people and systems handle each other: human-computer interaction research at the University of Michigan, and design ethnography for NASA's Exploration Medical Capability program, where the working question was how astronauts stay alive and autonomous when Earth is too far away to call. He was deep into a PhD in Information when he decided fiction was the better instrument, and left to write it.
His novels and essays take apart the systems people live inside — a publishing platform, a benefits office, a family, a magic system — and ask what each one does to the person caught in it.
His fiction is published through Strange Loop Press. The essays here set the real thing beside the invented thing: actual science, history, and ethnography next to the fictional conventions built on them, with the working shown.
He lives in Metro Detroit.
One essay every week or two. One free story now.
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