Wherever It Leads by C.M. Swinney

Dr. Sarah Chen has spent twenty years building a career on the assumption that the universe is, at its deepest level, indifferent. An assumption that shapes her methodology, her relationships, her sense of what science is for.

Then she finds the anomaly. It appears in the data from a routine quantum field experiment: a pattern that shouldn’t exist, a coherence with no physical explanation, a signal that seems to respond to the act of observation in ways that violate everything she knows about reality. Not a glitch. Something the equations don’t have room for.

Wherever It Leads is the first book in The Substrate Series. A five-novel exploration of the hypothesis that space itself is emergent from a deeper attending mind, built on real quantum field theory, the observer problem, and the hard problem of consciousness. For readers of Ted Chiang, Richard Powers and Andy Weir.

Category: Science Fiction – Metaphysical & Visionary