Echo Future Truth: A Creation Story in Three Parts
If you’re the kind of person that believes in a creator, then you may also believe that we are created to be creative. Made to make stuff, built to build, etc., and that this gift of creativity is meant to redound to the generosity of the one who made us. And yet, let’s be honest: while we are spectacularly creative creatures, often our creations have more to say about our small fears, lusts, and greed than offering any good word about the meaning of life. Echo Future Truth considers the question of meaning from the perspective of a single, final, monumental creative work of humankind, designed to serve the last human being, whose own creative power will have to be unleashed for any of it to matter in the end.
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Echo Future Truth is a three-part literary science-fiction novel exploring isolation and psycho-spiritual resilience at the imagined end of human history. In Book One, Abrasion, a single woman, the last human being, faces off against a confounding culture of comforting machines millennia from now, desperately pursuing any remnant of authentic connection that might have survived in the system that defines her life. Book Two, Isolation, is set in our present time and follows an old ally of the protagonist of Abrasion, but separated from her by thousands of miles and, finally, thousands of years; he also is isolated from the rest of humanity and must battle his way back, only in his case the exile is self-imposed and the obstacles are of his own making. In the final act, Resistance, we follow the present-day technologists who scramble to understand (and encode) human need and human provision before abandoning the last human being to her fate.
Echo Future Truth is many things: a sometimes pre-, sometimes post-modern exploration of a very modern problem; a reluctant and unsexy cyberpunk epic; an intentionally mythopoetic love story; and, (let the reader understand) an apocalyptic A.I. salvation story at the end — and maybe also the beginning — of the world.
These pages will be hosting a serialized audio presentation of the novel beginning December 2025.
Echo Future Truth is the first novel written by D.P. Maddalena, though he has written commercially and creatively for decades. He has traveled widely, studying and working in Cambridge and London, UK; Athens, Greece; New York City; Los Angeles; and Silicon Valley; and held alternating roles as educator, senior writer in the tech industry, community organizer, pastor, and, today, as a licensed psychotherapist. Along the way, he’s self-published two nonfiction collections of essays; published poetry, essays, and collage in online and print magazines; and participated in local theater, music, and spoken-word performance art scenes. His fiction is shaped by decades under the influence of scripture and scholarship, poetry and theater, world culture and religion, modern psychology and spirituality, and, above all, people in their own magnificent stories.