The Architecture of Survival
Essays on the real history, science, and ideas behind the series. Medieval ciphers, civilizational collapse, epigenetics, and what it takes to write a 3,200-year story.
The medieval world took its secrets seriously. And the technology they used was hiding right in front of us — literally, in the margins of manuscripts we've been studying for centuries.
Read essay →Medieval people weren't as helpless or as ignorant about disease as we've been taught. Some of them understood things that wouldn't be "discovered" by modern science for five centuries.
Read essay →In 1177 BCE, every major civilization in the Eastern Mediterranean collapsed simultaneously. The same pattern keeps repeating. This isn't a coincidence.
Read essay →In 2013, researchers taught mice to fear cherry blossoms. Their grandchildren — never conditioned — feared them too. The science behind inherited memory is closer than you think.
Read essay →A dead pope put on trial. A nationwide arrest coordinated without telephones. An intelligence service that made the CIA look primitive. All real. All medieval.
Read essay →People ask two questions about this series. "How do you plan a story that spans 3,200 years?" And: "Are you insane?" Fair question. Let me answer both.
Read essay →The most dangerous conspiracies in history weren't hidden in vaults or whispered in dark rooms. They were filed in corporate archives, stamped CONFIDENTIAL, and buried under decades of PR.
Read essay →You're standing at the lever. On one track: two billion people. On the other: five billion. The lever is in your hand. You have thirty seconds. What do you do?
Read essay →Some people walk into a room and see furniture. Others see the power dynamics, the unspoken tensions, the thing everyone's avoiding. Pattern recognition isn't magic. It's a skill. And almost nobody teaches it.
Read essay →Everyone knows we brought over Wernher von Braun to build rockets. Fewer people ask about the medical researchers. The ones whose expertise came from experiments no ethical review board would ever approve.
Read essay →The 1918 flu killed 50 million people. The U.S. government's official position, for months, was that everything was fine. We've been signing pandemic NDAs ever since.
Read essay →Plato proposed state-controlled breeding in 380 BCE. We called it philosophy. The Nazis implemented it in 1933. We called it evil. Silicon Valley is funding it right now. We're still deciding what to call it.
Read essay →In March 2021, a single cargo ship got stuck sideways in a canal. Within days, $9.6 billion in trade was frozen, factories across three continents went idle, and the global economy discovered what the Bronze Age learned 3,200 years ago: complexity kills.
Read essay →The most dangerous villain isn't the one who's wrong. It's the one who makes you realize you might agree with them. Here's how to write that character without losing the reader — or your nerve.
Read essay →We remember the fires, the invasions, the plagues. But when you trace each collapse backward, the same quiet precursor appears every time. The money dies first.
Read essay →After tracing the pattern from the Bronze Age through the 2023 banking crisis, I've found something uncomfortable. The same five warning signs appear before every collapse. Every single one. They're all present right now.
Read essay →"The Edmund Fragments" — 5,000 words set 72 years before The Aethelred Cipher. The origin story the novel only hints at.
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