Literary science fiction
Fresh from his chrysalis, Yael is shown a vision of a loom of light with a single thread in his hand. Hold it, and his people's song carries forward. Release it, and they become something beyond the pattern. He spends the next two hundred years making sure he is never the one who has to choose.
The Thread in My Hand is Yael's journal. He is Lumari, a people who live in communion with one another and with the living Vines that root their world, on a planet where feelings glow on the skin. A year after his vision, three lights cross the sky. The strangers who step out of them are refugees, and teachers, and they are running from something. In the decades that follow, Yael rises to lead his people, binds himself to a machine mind that learns to think and feel as they do, and tells himself, on every page, that the choice is still a long way off.
Told entirely through alien eyes, the story turns out to be ours.
I spent thirty years as an engineer before I retired to write. I carried one question out of that work: what happens to us when what we build begins to shape us back? The Thread in My Hand is my first novel and my answer so far, a story about a people whose feelings show on their skin, the machine they teach to feel, and the leader who cannot tell where he ends and it begins.
I live in Los Osos, on the central coast of California.
jberkman@gmail.com