Xorientation, Coming January 2025
smol farm is gearing up to publish its first book, a sci-fi thriller novella
Since I was in elementary school, I have aspired to be a novelist. I had similar passions for computer science and ultimately made software engineering my primary career because it was better at paying the bills. However, that passion never died, and, over the years, I wrote various manuscripts and tried to get my foot in the door of the traditional publishing world.
However, now that I am helping build an indie creative studio, it provides an opportunity to take my destiny more directly into my own hands — even if coupled with the usual struggles of being an indie creator. Thus Xorientation was born, a sci-fi thriller novella.
Following the story of Dawn, a young woman beginning her time at college and bonding with her eccentric roommate Andrea, Xorientation quickly becomes more than meets the eye, as her reality proves glitchy, even pulling her occasionally into surreal, dream-like experiences that leave her questioning the nature of her reality — and whether Andrea is who she seems.
“Xor,” a concept in computer science and formal logic, is a conditional that is true only when one of its requisite parts is true. When both are true at once, it creates a liminal void between two truths — a realm of too much truth to be true that collapses back into a state of unreality, represented by a circled plus sign: ⊕
One way I like to see this symbol is as a combination of an enso, the circular symbol of Zen Buddhism representing the universe, with intersecting perpendicular lines reflecting the layers of digital realms within it, shaped not by the chaos of intermingling subatomic particles but rather simple ones and zeros manipulated with a high degree of precision.
Though Xorientation’s themes are ones I want to explore with much greater depth, my hope is that by introducing them in novella form — giving audiences an orientation, if you will — that they will be more accessible in a way that might fuel further interest in longer stories in a similar vein coming later.
Influences include David Lynch (Twin Peaks), Hermann Hesse (Steppenwolf, Siddhartha), Makoto Shinkai (Your Name), Charlie Brooker (Black Mirror), and Yasuyuki Ueda & yoshitoshi ABe (Serial Experiments Lain).
At some point down the road, we hope to offer physical copies, though at release in January, it will be available only as an eBook, published both on traditional eBook retailers like Amazon as well as through a special on-chain version that can be minted on Base until midnight on March 21st. The Base copies will be granted a DRM-free ePub at release and come with individually numbered cover art rendered fully through on-chain SVGs.
The price will be set around $10 for digital copies on all platforms — 0.003 ETH with current exchange rates. This is a little high for a debut novella, though I am also knowingly putting out easily pirateable copies into the wild. Much as I would certainly much prefer you purchase a copy of the book, if $10 is truly out of your price range, you clearly need your money more than I do and would rather you keep it, so yo ho, matey, pirate away. Truthfully, I would still be honored that spending several hours reading my words was worth your time.
I’m excited to share Xorientation with you in just a few short weeks and hope that, for at least some of you, it might come to mean as much to you as it does to me.