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 metaphysical questions in intimate interiority, 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 meaning to endure.
She is currently seeking representation for a four-book series set within a shared near-future, 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 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 exists in stark contrast to Jakob’s interior life, and a stepmother whose warmth and intuitive openness register what he does not, 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 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 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 non-rational forms of knowing placing her increasingly at odds with a civilization organized around mechanized consciousness.
This early intimacy 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 flattens Jenny’s emotional depth and intuitive capacity, leaving Katy to grieve a sister who is still alive, yet no longer 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 draws her into a relationship rooted more in recognition than promise. During this time, Katy 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.
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 protecting those undergoing natural 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 cost of 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 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, non-mechanized human becoming is 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 emergent capacities in 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 academic life, algorithmically curated identities, romantic entanglements, and the early stages of activation under Nyla’s guidance. With surveillance tightening, Nyla withdraws 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 ongoing transformations.
What follows is not a single revolution, but a reckoning, as mechanized forces move to enforce a singular evolutionary future no longer subject to consent or refusal.
Artifact: Lullabies from the Abyss
A novel in progress
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 takes form.
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 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, reshaping the conditions that brought the world, and Santi, to this brink.
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 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, with 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.
Alongside her writing, Jaclyn maintains an independent private practice focused on integrative guidance, existential inquiry, psychological grounding, meditation, and ceremonial work.
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