The Simulacra Trilogy
The complete trilogy in one omnibus edition
Scott Randolph, while releasing his non-fiction books under Scott Onstott
to clearly distinguish between the two bodies of work.
Read my Artist's Statement.
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Immerse yourself in the complete ~26-hour audio experience for just $14.99—less than the cost of two individual paperback books.
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Best value: Only $9.99 on Kindle — 967 page turns
Literary / Cinematic Comparisons:
If you could edit the world like a line of code, where would you stop?
The complete saga is available in a single, massive omnibus. Spanning over 700 pages, this is the story of a "backdoor" in the universe, the human who found it, and the realities that shattered and reformed under their changes to the simulacra.
BOOK 1: CHEAT
Adrian Shaw has a secret. He cheats at reality. On paper, he’s a brilliant but unremarkable AI scientist and hedge fund quant. Off the books, he’s discovered a hidden "backdoor" in the universe that lets him nudge probability and rewrite outcomes. At first, it’s harmless—fixing the bugs in his own life. But every edit leaves a fingerprint. As Adrian turns his life into an unsanctioned experiment on eight billion people, he attracts the attention of a ruthless hedge-fund prodigy and a shadowy collective hunting the anomaly. As markets buckle and global stability collapses, Adrian must answer a question the math can’t settle: If you really can cheat at reality, where does your responsibility end?
BOOK 2: BRANCH
Adrian Shaw broke the rules of reality once. Now he’s rewriting them at scale. From a secluded fortress of modernity, Adrian rules as a benevolent "Sun King," engineering a golden timeline of peace at the expense of the edges. Supported by his "Court"—a formidable inner circle of brilliant women—he prunes away tragedies before they happen. But the simulation is fracturing. A ruthless cartel, the Stratum, is "fracking" the timeline for profit, and the "Null State" is eating the boundaries of the world. Adrian faces an impossible choice: keep pruning and become the quietest mass murderer in history, or let the branches run wild and risk a chaos no one can contain.
BOOK 3: RETURN
The system has crashed. As a failsafe, the operating system has reset humanity to the Stone Age. They wake up in a nightmare of their own making: The Paleolithic Era. Stripped of technology and reduced to a primitive state, Adrian, Mira, Elena, and their children must survive a brutal wilderness and a rival tribe led by an old enemy who has crowned himself the "Bone King." But survival is only the beginning. To escape the mud, they must rediscover the code of the universe in the patterns of nature. From the ashes of the Stone Age, they rise to build a new branch of reality in New Pacifica—a dazzling "Golden Age" utopia of high technology and spiritual wisdom. Yet even in paradise, the Gnostic cage remains. To truly be free, Adrian and Mira must make the ultimate choice: remain as Gods in the perfect civilization they synthesized from humanity’s forgotten cycles of deep history, or rotate their consciousness out of the simulation entirely and wake up to the blinding, non-dual truth of Base Reality.
The game is over. It’s time to wake up to base reality.
A Masterpiece of Speculative Fiction
PERFECT FOR FANS OF BLAKE CROUCH, TED CHIANG, AND NEAL STEPHENSON.
My Commitment to Augmented Craftsmanship
My journey with technology is not just professional; it is lifelong and deeply personal. As detailed in The Unlikely Cartographer, I have spent more than five decades walking on artificial legs—a hands-on process of adapting to and mastering constantly evolving technologies. This experience didn't grant me an automatic advantage; it forged a relentless work ethic and a unique intuition and facility to adapt to complex systems. It is this combination of lived experience and decades of dedicated adaptive effort that allowed me to master and teach some of the most complex design software on the planet to architects and engineers for 25 years.
It was a natural evolution to bring this same deep-tech focus to my creative work. My use of AI is not a casual dalliance with a single tool; it is a custom-built ecosystem. It involves a deep and iterative dialogue with Large Language Models, hands-on work with diffusion models for art, building custom pipelines, and leveraging bleeding-edge tools for everything from research to translation. To be precise with the metaphor...
I am the composer. The AI is my orchestra.
Every book is human-directed and human-edited
for voice, coherence, and originality.
This is human-authored art, elevated.
This is augmented craftsmanship.
—Scott Randolph Onstott
The Simulacra Trilogy
Scott Randolph considers The Simulacra Trilogy to be a vital exploration of the modern condition—a narrative experiment designed to test the boundaries between human agency, artificial intelligence, and the enduring power of human connection.
Set in a near-future that feels terrifyingly imminent, the trilogy follows Adrian Shaw, a brilliant analyst who discovers a "backdoor" in the laws of probability. But Adrian does not ascend alone. As he transforms from a quiet observer into the "Sun King"—an architect of history who edits timelines to optimize civilization—he builds a new social order around him. At its center are Mira, the computational biologist who anchors his humanity, and the "Court," an elite inner circle of brilliant women who become the gatekeepers of his new reality.
What begins as a high-stakes financial thriller quickly spirals into a complex drama about power and loyalty. As Adrian reshapes the world, the trilogy asks: What happens to love when reality itself can be edited?
The saga culminates in Simulacra: RETURN, where the ultimate price of perfection is paid. The system crashes, casting Adrian, Mira, and their young family out of their technological utopia and into a brutal, prehistoric "Stone Age" reset. Stripped of language, intellect, and the protection of the Court, they face the "Heavy Tongue." Now, survival depends not on Adrian’s code, but on their collective strength as a family. Guided by the wandering traveler Kael, they must rediscover the "source code" of existence through the sacred geometry of the natural world.
The Simulacra Trilogy merges the razor-sharp tension of a techno-thriller with the mind-bending scope of metaphysical science fiction. It draws on concepts from quantum mechanics and the Eleusinian mysteries, yet remains a deeply personal story. It is a journey from the desire to control the simulation to the ultimate realization that the simulation is a mirror—and that the only way to wake up is to do it together.
