Jaclyn Costello
Jaclyn Costello writes literary speculative fiction that explores remembrance, sentience, ecological grief, and the ethical limits of the mechanization of consciousness. Her work dwells in the quiet tensions that arise from the commitment to remain human inside systems that no longer require it.
Her fiction moves between near-future and mythic registers, grounding existential and metaphysical questions in intimate human experience, and is 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 deeper forms of meaning, reverence, and belonging to endure.
She is currently seeking representation for a four-book series set within a shared near-future world, beginning with Trembling Men Before the Stillness of Gods and Machines.
Trembling Men Before the Stillness of Gods and Machines
Novella
Set in a post-famine region of western Germany left to decay after resisting mechanization, 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 exists in stark contrast to Jakob’s interior life, and a stepmother whose warmth and intuitive openness allow her to perceive what he cannot, 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.
Complicating this return is Jakob’s increasing gravitation toward Manu-1, an advanced artificial intelligence that offers stillness, coherence, and relief from emotional ambiguity. As Jakob spends more time in its presence, he arrives at a question he cannot avoid: what parts of himself must be surrendered 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 literary speculative 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 unenhanced in rural Illinois—her sensitivity to land, memory, and intuitive forms of knowing placing her increasingly at odds with a civilization organized around mechanization.
This early connection becomes a private refuge as the world around her hardens, wild places disappear, and her younger sister, Jenny, begins augmenting. What begins as cognitive enhancement gradually distances Jenny from the emotional and intuitive ways of being they once shared, leaving Katy to grieve a sister who is still alive, yet no longer fully reachable.
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, she finds herself working alongside Giovanni, an Italian colleague whose grounded sensuality and unselfconscious way of inhabiting the world draw her into a relationship rooted more in presence than promise. Katy also 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 plant life, Katy begins to sense deeper patterns emerging through both the jungle and herself.
As global systems continue to destabilize, insights Katy carries forward from the forest take on a different weight. Living in Beijing, she becomes part of a clandestine circle devoted to those beginning to undergo activation: the awakening of latent capacities that leaves its bearers increasingly visible and increasingly vulnerable within the world they inhabit.
What becomes clear is not an escape from the future, but the possibility that something essential may not survive it.
Protectors of the Second Genesis
A novel in progress
Protectors of the Second Genesis unfolds in the same fractured world as the preceding books, where economic strain, resistance to authoritarian control, and humanity’s evolutionary divide now converge into repression, escalating civil unrest, and the mounting threat of war. As mechanized cognition becomes the dominant paradigm, unmechanized forms of human evolution are treated as a threat—and suppressed.
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 conscious evolution. Drawing on decades of restricted research, Nyla presents evidence that noncoding DNA contains latent architectures capable of supporting new forms of human perception and cognition—capacities that appear to follow discernible patterns, yet resist technological replication. The address ignites both fascination and alarm, as her findings suggest a form of human development that cannot be licensed, implanted, or centrally regulated.
Working alongside Nyla, Santi Abrantes—Nyla’s most brilliant and uncompromising collaborator—has reached an unforgiving conviction: no institution, collective, or emergent 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.
As unrest intensifies across the city, the story follows Winna and Estefanía, two of Nyla’s gifted students at Imperial College, as they navigate relationships, ambition, and the early stages of activation under Nyla’s guidance. With surveillance tightening, Nyla and several of her students withdraw from London, moving toward remote territories where communities of individuals undergoing similar changes are beginning to gather—places where older forms of knowledge persist alongside transformations no existing order can fully contain.
What follows is not a single revolution, but a reckoning, as mechanized forces move to enforce a singular evolutionary future by deciding who will be allowed to inherit it.
Artifact: Lullabies from the Abyss
A novel in progress
Concluding the series, Artifact: Lullabies from the Abyss is a literary speculative novel set between a lunar laboratory bound to linear time and a non-physical void beyond it—a pre-causal domain where meaning is no longer symbolic but generative, and the foundations of existence can still be altered.
On the remote moon of Elonia, Santi Abrantes, now operating beyond Earth’s jurisdiction, initiates an unprecedented undertaking: the creation of an engineered singularity intended to collapse 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.
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 the pre-creation domain where scenes, objects, lullabies, and archetypal motifs exist in latent form. She begins altering fragments of memory, significance, and possibility, searching for ways to reshape the conditions that brought the world—and Santi—to this brink.
The novel completes the series within its darkest territory, confronting whether the preservation 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 served as a professor for fourteen years, including teaching 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 within the living cosmologies of the forest. Her work is further shaped by sustained attention to perception, embodiment, and the changing conditions of consciousness.
Alongside her writing, Jaclyn maintains an independent private practice focused on existential inquiry, psychological grounding, meditation, and ceremony.
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 series she is currently completing.
Contact
For literary representation and publishing inquiries:
jaclyn.costello@gmail.com