Creativity was killed, replaced by ennui, and she’s to blame. Can humanity be saved?
Berkeley, CA, 2052. Alice Blair’s nightmare has only just begun. Waking up in the body of her middle-aged future self, the sixteen-year-old savior is aghast she unwittingly extinguished the spark of human creativiity and drove society into a drug-dependent dystopia. Determined to turn the world around, her only chance lies in an uneasy alliance with a dangerously hungry artificial intelligence.
Agreeing to get the AI onto an alien planet in exchange for help bringing back beauty, Alice feels more adult by the day. But her methods could forestall the ambitions of the dark matter god and incite his wraith…
Can this body-displaced teen step up and save Earth from deletion?
Triumph of Beauty is the phenomenal conclusion to the Her Dark Matter Necklace contemporary YA science fiction trilogy. If you like breakneck adventures, mind-boggling stakes, and electrifying universes, then you’ll love Robert Albo’s hope-filled finale for a better world and universe.
An Interview with Robert
-Did you find it difficult to transition to writing from Alice’s perspective as an adult? What were the greatest differences from writing about her as a teenager?
As a teenager, Alice was filled with self-doubt even though she was the chosen one. It was only as an adult, when she embraced her emotions, instead of hiding from them, that she found the path to save the world. The tricky part in writing about Alice were the transitions from teenager to teenager in adult body and then to adult. I often asked myself how I would act if I was a teenager who woke up thirty-two years later in a middle-aged body in a technologically advanced world. The road from denial to acceptance would be difficult.
-You show a fetus with dark matter activity around 8 months gestation, and adults with Dementia have dark matter activity, while adults with no higher brain function do not. Why did you choose for dark matter to be present or not in these situations?
Dark matter can’t be seen or touched; only its gravitational effects can be observed. This aligns to modern scientific theory.
The fictional speculation is that people have a unique dark matter bundle attached to their active brain. This bundle is our immortal soul and enables consciousness. The bundle attaches to the fetus when complex brain activity occurs. It detaches and vanishes into a fourth dimension when the brain dies.
-What messages about AI do you hope readers get from Triumph of Beauty?
AI today has some nice applications like navigation or SIRI or art generation, but it’s relatively inconsequential to society. In thirty years, AI will transform the world. All repetitive tasks or work based on historical patterns will be automated. There will be a few highly educated human creators who will develop new ideas. For most people, there will be little incentive to go to school since AI/robotics will do most jobs better and cheaper than any human. Most people won’t have a job but will receive a government stipend. The question is what will they do?
In my book, people turn to entertainment and Dreamland. The family institution fractures as people just focus on themselves, assisted by Dreamland. Birthrates fall because people don’t want to be parents or bring children into this world. However, there is a path forward for people to have lives of love and beauty. Alice finds the answer, and with AI, brings it to Earth and other worlds.
-What was your inspiration for Dreamland?
The inspiration was a book called Dreamland about the opiate epidemic in America. It discussed how opiates helped users relieve their physical and mental pain, but also how it could lead to addiction, drug abuse, wasted lives, and death.
In my story, fictional Dreamland helps users relieve boredom, depression, and lack of purpose. It also makes VR games seen through user glasses more immersive.
My story also has a Dreamland reset drug to break the addiction. This was inspired by new LSD therapies used today to break drug addiction and PTSD.
-Now that you’ve wrapped up the story of Alice’s dark matter bundle, what’s next?
Well, I still have the bug to write. Her Dark Matter Necklace series is unusual because it crosses multiple genres: YA, Sci-fi, spiritual, religious, modern world equity. Most readers pick books based on a single genre or author so my new books will fit this model.
My next book, fourth, will be hard sci-fi and tell the story of a gifted but unmotivated man in a future world that has pervasive AI. To help me with the science, I took an undergraduate course in quantum mechanics at UC Berkeley.
My planned fifth book will be religious and talk about an atheist who lost her faith in her religion but then finds the true God. Religious leaders will attack her, like Christians quoting from the Bible, “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.” A new belief will surface, focused on God’s will, not on institutional doctrine.