The Question That Changed My Novel

When I began writing What the Stars Encoded, I thought I knew what kind of story it would be.

I knew the disease. I knew the cure. I knew who would carry that cure forward, and what was at stake for them.

In other words, I thought I was writing a hopeful novel.

It became something else.

What the journals were saying

As a clinician, I approach science in fiction the same way I approach medicine: by reading the literature, following the evidence, and paying attention when reality becomes stranger than expectation.

While researching gene therapy, I spent weeks reading about viral delivery systems—the microscopic vehicles used to transport genetic treatments into the body. I expected incremental improvements.

Instead, I found something more unsettling.

Researchers were exploring layered delivery architectures: protein cages within protein cages, biological vehicles designed to reveal hidden functions only after reaching specific conditions. Some respond to enzymes, others to pH, others to time itself.

The concept is sometimes described as a Matryoshka design.

The science fascinated me. But it wasn't the science that changed the novel.

It was the question hiding inside it.

The question I couldn’t stop asking

What does it mean to receive a gift whose second function you cannot yet see?

At first glance, that sounds like a technical problem.

It isn't.

It's a question about trust.

A question about consent.

A question about whether we can meaningfully agree to a technology whose most important effects may remain invisible until long after the decision has been made.

I realized I was no longer writing a story about a cure.

I was writing a story about what it costs to accept one.

The people I had built this book around looked different to me. The cure was no longer just a solution. It had become a test of trust—in science, in institutions, and in one another.

What fiction can do

Medicine trains you to look for complications before successes.

When I read those papers, I found myself thinking less about engineering challenges and more about human conversations that have not happened yet.

How do you explain a hidden function to someone clearly enough that it remains their decision?

How do you earn trust when part of the technology is designed to remain unseen?

Those are not questions science can answer alone.

They are human questions.

And that is where stories become necessary.

What the Stars Encoded does not claim to solve these problems. It simply places its characters inside them. My hope is that readers will find themselves there as well.

The science behind the novel is real. The technologies are emerging. The ethical questions are no longer science fiction.

They are arriving now.

This book exists because I could not stop thinking about one of them.