INFERNAL COLUMNS

My second novel, arriving (Eris willing) late 2026. It will be much less science-focused than the first one, though still full of little STEMmy infodumps.

It is a tale of confusion. Its characters possess drastically different information about the events in which they are immersed. Reliable narrators do not exist. Truth shifts, and the rate of change accelerates. The world convulses; climate becomes less hospitable to life; humanity changes the world once more. The very meanings of "humanity" and "the world" come into question. Answers are in short supply.

INFERNAL COLUMNS explores:

• technological, sociological, and philosophical nearterm impacts of electronic intelligence
• electronic warfare and espionage (especially as affected by AI)
• disinformation at personal, national, and international scales (especially as affected by AI)
• resource allocation, eugenics, climate change, geoengineering, and conflict arising therefrom
• political violence, democracy's failure, and what might replace it
• the future of humanity

Title

INFERNAL COLUMNS refers to the Colonnes Infernales under Général de division Louis Marie Turreau during the Guerre de Vendée. Here he writes to the Convention's Minister of War Jean Baptiste Noël Bouchotte (January 1794):

My purpose is to burn everything, to leave nothing but what is essential to establish the necessary quarters for exterminating the rebels.

This great measure is one which you should prescribe. You should also make an advance statement as to the fate of the women and children we will come across in this rebellious countryside...All brigands caught bearing arms, or convicted of having taken up arms to revolt against their country, will be bayoneted. The same will apply to girls, women and children in the same circumstances. Those who are merely under suspicion will not be spared either.

All villages, farms, woods, heathlands, generally anything which will burn, will be set on fire, although not until any perishable supplies found there have been removed.

I hasten to describe to you the measures which I have just put in hand for the extermination of all remaining rebels scattered about the interior of the Vendée. I was convinced that the only way to do this was by deploying a sufficient number of columns, to spread right across the countryside and effect a general sweep, which would completely purge the districts as they passed. Tomorrow these 12 columns will set out simultaneously, moving from east to west.

Later...

There is no more Vendée. I have trampled the children to death with our horses, I have massacred the women, and they are no longer able to give birth to any brigands. I am not guilty of taking a single prisoner, I have exterminated them all… The roads are covered with corpses. There are so many of them at several places they form pyramids. The firing squads work incessantly… Brigands arrive who pretend that they will surrender as prisoners… but we are not taking any. One would be forced to feed them with the bread of liberty, but compassion is not a revolutionary virtue.