James Te Ronde’s Menticulous is a mind-bendingly prophetic novel about the future, human nature and the nature of reality itself.

When a titanic tech conglomerate comes knocking at Cooper Timm’s front door, he sees their job offer as a chance to resurrect his stalled career and restart his life. What he doesn’t expect is to be made the lead engineer on a top-secret project that has mystified Silicon Valley conspiracy theorists for years.

Catapulted into leading a small team of old friends and fellow innovators, Coop barely has a moment to breathe before one of his colleagues is brutally slaughtered, and a rival tech giant becomes the lead suspect. As Coop learns more about the famed Menticulous and its jaw-dropping ability to create artificial worlds, he understands why two of the planet’s most powerful corporations are locked in a battle to the bloody death; he who controls reality controls the world.

Te Ronde’s creativity is on full display in his writing style and spiraling plot; by destabilizing the boundaries of reality for his characters, he also destabilizes our confidence as readers. The untrustworthy narration leads to a visceral, interactive reading experience that’s dizzying and addictive. At the same time, interpersonal relationships are oddly playful and authentic, helping ground core characters within the larger hallucination-laced plot. Even so, secrets swirl everywhere, around mathematic principles, hidden ambitions, corporate scheming and suppressed desire.

The narration is self-aware and consistently sharp, although sometimes conversations become indelicate vessels for exposition. Some secondary characters feel underdeveloped, or less consistent in their personalities, whereas the Menticulous technology is given a complex and layered identity. This personification of technology is present in many stories about artificial intelligence, but the synthesis of so many cutting-edge advancements in this story, from energy-mass equivalence and 5-D virtual reality to instantaneously generative AI, gives the writing inevitable momentum.

Impressive in both its imagination and real-world warnings, Menticulous’ bold, boundary-pushing narrative is sure to please genre fans.

Also available as an ebook.