Jaclyn Costello
Jaclyn Costello writes literary speculative fiction that explores remembrance, sentience, ecological grief, and the mechanization of consciousness. Her work dwells in the quiet tensions that arise from the commitment to remain human within a future that no longer requires it.
Her fiction moves between the speculative and the mythic, 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 civilizational 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 literary series set within a shared speculative 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 region of western Germany left to decay after resisting mechanization, Trembling Men Before the Stillness of Gods and Machines follows Jakob, a young man 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 fierce capacity for feeling stands in stark contrast to Jakob's emotional restraint, and a stepmother who needs Jakob not for comfort but for his unsparing witnessing, 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 gravitation toward Manu-1, a contemplative 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 life unfolds alongside a profound civilizational shift. In 2156, humanity is leaving itself behind as neural augmentation and artificial intelligence transform society through the mechanization of consciousness. Most people embrace the transition. Katy struggles to make peace with what is being lost.
Raised in rural Illinois, Katy comes of age in kinship with stars, birds, and wild meadows. Those early relationships become a way of remembering what it means to encounter the living world with attention, tenderness, wonder, and intimacy—a way of belonging quietly disappearing from the mechanized civilization around her. The deepest rupture comes when neural augmentation reaches her own family, leaving Katy grieving a loved one who is still alive, yet no longer fully reachable.
Years later, while working as a painter documenting vanishing ecosystems in the Amazon, Katy falls in love with Giovanni, an Italian science writer whose warmth and unguardedness draw her into a relationship rooted more in presence than promise. Amid birdsong, the slow rhythms of the river, and the tangled abundance of the Amazon, they find themselves held by an ancient intelligence animating the rainforest. Under the guidance of Tawashuin, a Yawanawá elder who teaches Katy to trust what she already carries, she begins to experience transformations that blur the boundary between the ordinary and the impossible.
What begins in the rainforest continues in Beijing, where her transformation intensifies within a clandestine circle of others undergoing activation—the awakening of a forgotten inheritance of human capacities—revealing that the future may not lie along a single evolutionary path. Yet even as another path begins to emerge, mechanization continues its relentless advance, claiming more of the people, places, and ways of life Katy loves. She comes to understand that the world taking shape around her no longer has a place for the humanity she holds most dear—and that the future may be incompatible with everything she is becoming.
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, authoritarian control, and humanity's evolutionary divide now converge into escalating civil unrest and the mounting threat of war. As mechanized cognition becomes the dominant paradigm, unaugmented citizens are treated as a threat to social order.
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 human 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 even the emergent class of the activated can be trusted not to corrupt what is still worth preserving of the human lineage. Protection will require freeing that inheritance from humanity itself by placing it within an autonomous molecular structure beyond consent, governance, and interference, allowing it to continue evolving unimpeded.
As unrest intensifies across London, the story follows Winna and Estefanía, two of Nyla's gifted students at Imperial College, as they navigate friendship, love, ambition, and the early stages of activation under Nyla's guidance. With surveillance tightening and public hostility growing, Nyla and her students withdraw from the city to remote territories where communities of individuals undergoing similar changes are gathering.
What follows is not a single revolution, but a reckoning, as mechanized forces move to enforce a singular evolutionary future—and those undergoing activation struggle to protect the possibility of another.
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 undertaking and decide whether it should be sanctioned. As the singularity grows, she moves between the physical constraints of Elonia and the pre-creation domain where scenes, objects, relationships, 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 destroying the living universe that gave rise to it.
About the Author
Jaclyn Costello holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and later served as an Associate Professor in the UNLV Honors College, where she taught interdisciplinary courses blending literature, philosophy, creativity, and questions of meaning. Her fiction draws in part from years of immersive study across multiple continents, including significant time in the Amazon. It is also shaped by a sustained contemplative practice, her experience as a counselor, and longstanding explorations of perception, embodiment, and the nature of consciousness.
Jaclyn's 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