In the age after fabrication, the line between what is made and what is real has not been crossed — it has dissolved. Someone is about to discover what remains beneath.
The Great Fabrication Age is a speculative fiction series set in a civilization that has mastered the replication of almost anything — materials, memories, histories, and selves. Wakes & Shadows is its first entry: a story of one person navigating a world where authenticity is not a virtue but a crime, and where the past has been fabricated so thoroughly that excavating the real from the manufactured may be impossible.
It is a novel about craft and deception, about the archaeology of meaning, and about whether something made can still carry weight — moral, spiritual, historical. It draws on traditions of social science fiction while carving its own distinct terrain between literary ambition and genre momentum.
The series is complete in outline. Wakes & Shadows is finished and in editorial development.
"The question was never whether they could build it again — the question was whether the copy would know what it had lost."Wakes & Shadows, Ch. 7
When a civilization can manufacture history, identity, and memory at scale, what does it mean for anything to be real? The novel presses this question without offering easy resolution.
Who controls what is remembered controls what is true. The institutions of the Fabrication Age are not sinister in obvious ways — they are bureaucratic, plausible, and deeply invested in their own legitimacy.
A sword forged by a master carries something a replicated sword does not — but what, exactly? The novel takes this question seriously as theology, aesthetics, and ethics simultaneously.
The protagonist must excavate backward through layers of constructed reality — not just the world's, but her own — to understand what she actually is, and what she has been made to be.
This is not a utopia story or a dystopia story. It is a story set inside the long, strange aftermath of a civilization that solved most of its material problems and created entirely new spiritual ones.
Running beneath the plot is a quieter story about loss — of people, of places, of versions of the self that cannot be reconstructed. Not everything in the Fabrication Age can be replaced.
David is a writer based in northern Vermont. His background spans medieval history, materials science, and the kind of hands-on engineering work that teaches you more about how things are made than any classroom can. He has been building things — physical and textual — for most of his adult life.
Wakes & Shadows is his first novel. It took the interests of a decade — authenticity, craft, power, the archaeology of meaning — and gave them a place to live. The Great Fabrication Age series is outlined through multiple volumes; Book One is complete.
He is currently in editorial development, working toward representation and traditional publication. The newsletter is the best way to follow that journey.