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LanternHumane, wry, hopeful speculative fiction — stories where things get hard, and people who rise to meet them.
Behind the byline
T. H. Mercer writes humane, wry speculative fiction — near-future stories where things get hard and people rise to meet them, built on competence, care, and making amends through action. The fiction lives in the gap between what a system does and what a person needs: characters who understand the rules, see the exits, and choose the harder way anyway.
A former software engineer, he spent years working that same gap for a living before coming back to fiction full time. His short stories have appeared in Space & Time and in anthologies from Raconteur Press and Dragon Soul Press; his debut collection is Moral Arithmetic. Relay — his first long-form book — is serializing here, one chapter a week.
If you've ever dog-eared a Pratchett for the footnotes, or stayed up past midnight with Scalzi, Martha Wells, Becky Chambers, or the Expanse, you'll probably feel at home.
⌖ Northern Virginia
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Mara keeps people safe by making sure nobody can prove she was ever there — an off-grid courier trade, a found family who never ask what she's carrying, a lover on the system's own payroll who doesn't ask either. Then a routine job turns out to be a whistleblower with a piece of the machine strapped to his chest, and everyone who has ever trusted her not to be found starts needing her to be exactly that.
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Four people. Four institutions. Four small refusals.
Naomi is a postdoc cataloguing a defunct radio telescope program when she finds the signal her predecessors spent their lives listening for. Declan is six weeks into a contract that already costs more than he was told it would, and is being offered a longer one. Elena has staked her career on refusing to delete an artificial mind she trained, when keeping it alive becomes inconvenient. Ethan is watching his country slip below a threshold he set for himself two years ago, on a spreadsheet only he has seen.
Moral Arithmetic is a debut collection of literary speculative fiction about the quiet negotiations people make when the systems they live inside stop deserving them. From SETI labs to corporate war zones, T. H. Mercer follows characters who keep showing up for the work even when the work cannot show up for them.
For readers of Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life and Others and Emily St. John Mandel's Sea of Tranquility.
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