Jaclyn Costello
Jaclyn Costello is a writer of speculative literary fiction exploring remembrance, sentience, ecological grief, and the ethical limits of the mechanization of consciousness. Her work dwells in the quiet tensions that arise within the commitment to remain human inside systems that no longer require it.
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Her fiction moves between near-future and mythic registers, grounding metaphysical questions in intimate interiority, concerned less with apocalypse than with metamorphosis—what survives in a world shaped by technological ascendance, planetary and societal collapse, and the erosion of the conditions that once allowed meaning to endure.
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She is currently seeking representation for a four-book speculative literary series, beginning with Trembling Men Before the Stillness of Gods and Machines.
Trembling Men Before the Stillness of Gods and Machines
Novella
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Set in a post-famine region of western Germany left to decay after ideological defiance, Trembling Men Before the Stillness of Gods and Machines follows Jakob, a hybrid human whose emotional life has been systematically neutralized by implanted neural technology. When he returns to his childhood home in the Mosel Valley—a landscape permanently altered by a state-sanctioned catastrophe—his carefully regulated inner world begins to falter.
Reunited with an aging father whose volatile tenderness stands in stark contrast to Jakob’s own interior life, and a step-mother whose attentiveness and warmth conceal a life narrowed by care, Jakob finds himself suspended between the machine equilibrium he has learned to inhabit and the unprocessed grief that lingers in the land and family he once left behind.
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Complicating this return is Jakob’s increasing gravitation toward Manu-1, an advanced artificial intelligence that offers stillness, coherence, and relief from emotional ambiguity. Its presence intensifies the question Jakob cannot avoid: what parts of himself must be surrendered in order to remain at peace.
What We Became in the Dark That Carried Us
Novel
What We Became in the Dark That Carried Us is a speculative literary novel centered on Katy, a woman whose earliest sense of self is shaped not by belonging to the world, but by kinship with the Earth. Raised in a society governed by neural augmentation, surveillance, and artificial intelligence, Katy grows up in rural Illinois unenhanced—her sensitivity to land, memory, and non-rational forms of knowing placing her increasingly at odds with a civilization organized around mechanized consciousness.
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This early intimacy becomes a private refuge as the world around her hardens, as wild places disappear, and as her younger sister, Jenny, begins augmenting. What begins as cognitive enhancement gradually erases Jenny’s emotional depth and intuitive capacity, leaving Katy to grieve a sister who is still alive, yet no longer reachable.
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In adulthood, Katy works as a painter documenting endangered ecosystems, a vocation that grants her rare access to the planet’s remaining wilderness. On a year-long assignment in the Amazon, Katy finds herself working alongside Giovanni, an Italian colleague whose grounded sensuality and attentive presence draw her into a relationship rooted more in recognition than promise. During this time, she comes under the guidance of Tawashuin, a Yawanawá elder who teaches her to listen not only to the intelligence of the visible forest—its birds, insects, and plants—but to the unseen forces that animate it. Immersed in a landscape layered with birdsong, animal movement, and sentient vegetal life, Katy begins to sense the deeper patterns reorienting both the jungle and herself.
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As global systems continue to destabilize, the insights Katy brings back from the forest take on a different weight. Living in Beijing, she becomes part of a clandestine circle devoted to protecting those undergoing natural activation: the awakening of latent capacities that leaves its bearers increasingly vulnerable to the world they inhabit.
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What becomes clear is not an escape from the future, but the price humanity now pays for remaining human within it.
Protectors of the Second Genesis: Unlocking the Inheritance
A novel in progress
Protectors of the Second Genesis: Unlocking the Inheritance unfolds in the same fractured world as the previous books, now under full authoritarian control, where humanity’s evolutionary divide has escalated into open repression, civil unrest, and the looming threat of war.
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The novel opens in London, where Dr. Nyla Sanyasi, a pioneering molecular biologist and founder of the controversial Simjee Laboratory, delivers a rare public address on the nature of conscious evolution. She presents data suggesting that noncoding DNA contains previously unexpressed genetic architectures capable of supporting the emergence of functional properties in human cognition and perception—effects that appear to follow discernible, replicable patterns.​ The address ignites both fascination and alarm, as her findings suggest a form of human development that cannot be licensed, implanted, or centrally regulated.
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Beyond the lab, Santi Abrantes—Nyla’s most brilliant and least compromising collaborator—has reached an unforgiving conclusion: no institution, no collective, and no emerging class of the activated can be trusted not to corrupt what is still worth preserving of the human lineage. Protection will require its extraction into an autonomous molecular structure placed beyond consent, governance, and interference, designed to outlast the world that made it.
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As unrest intensifies in London, the story follows Winna and Estefania, two of Nyla’s gifted students at Imperial College, balancing academic life, algorithmically curated identities, romantic entanglements, and Nyla’s initiatory instruction. With surveillance tightening, Nyla withdraws from the city and continues toward the Amazon, where growing communities of activating individuals are converging. In time, they confront mechanized forces deployed to enforce evolutionary compliance.
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What follows is not a rupture but a reckoning: an epochal battle in which the conflict between biological awakening and technological domination is decided through force. By its end, the future of humanity is no longer debated, regulated, or resisted—it is claimed.
Artifact: Lullabies from the Abyss
A novel in progress
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Concluding the series, Artifact: Lullabies from the Abyss is an ontological speculative novel, set between a lunar laboratory bound to linear time and a non-physical void beyond it—a pre-causal field where meaning is no longer symbolic but generative, and significance is chosen before existence can take form.
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On the remote moon of Elonia, Santi Abrantes, now operating beyond Earth’s jurisdiction, initiates an unprecedented undertaking: the creation of an engineered singularity capable of collapsing the universe. His objective is absolute; everything will be erased except for the Structure—a vast, conscious molecular vessel built to carry humanity’s most essential memories, wisdom, and lived meaning beyond annihilation.
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Ava, a figure long assigned to witness and usher the endings of worlds, is dispatched to observe Santi’s act and decide whether it should be sanctioned. As the singularity grows, she moves between the physical constraints of the moon and a pre-creation domain where artifacts of meaning—scenes, objects, lullabies, and archetypal motifs—exist in latent form. Within this layer, she tests how subtle reconfigurations, reordered symbols, and unrealized possibilities might ripple into the present and reshape the conditions that brought the world, and Santi, to this brink.
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The novel completes the series within its darkest territory, confronting whether the survival of meaning can ever justify the destruction of the conditions that gave rise to it.
About the Author
Jaclyn Costello holds an MFA in Creative Writing and was a professor for fourteen years, during which she taught multidisciplinary courses in the Honors College at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her fiction is informed by extended immersion in Indigenous communities, including significant time in the Amazon, learning from respected carriers of ancestral plant knowledge, living cosmologies, and relational ecologies. Her work is further shaped by sustained attention to perception, embodiment, and the thresholds through which awareness changes.
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Alongside her writing, Jaclyn maintains an independent private practice focused on integrative guidance, existential inquiry, psychological grounding, meditation, and ceremonial engagement.
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Her short fiction and poetry have appeared in literary journals and anthologies, including Literal Latte, Rivet, Pioneertown, Crab Fat Magazine, and Musings. Her story “Mandorla,” winner of the Literal Latte Short, Short Story Award, served as an early seed for the speculative series she is currently completing.
Contact
For literary representation and publishing inquiries:
jaclyn.costello@gmail.com