FELICITY HARLEY

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I started my formal career working for MI6 and the Foreign Office in Iran. My job was to find out all I could about the Iran/Iraq war from British journalists who were there covering it. I spent two years in Iran before I returned to England, quit that job and came to the US.

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I wrote my first novel in Tehran about a disastrous affair I had with a Dutch banker who accidentally got his boss’s wife pregnant. As with most first novels it was autobiographical. I never attempted to get it published but have turned it into a short story called Persia that was published in a collection of short stories a few years ago. One of the collection’s focuses is landscape and I think of this story as a love letter to the geography of Iran. I’ve always been intrigued by the way the land influences people, and that’s why I called my book Portraits and Landscapes.

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In 2013, after I retired from running an organization that was involved in high level geo-politics, I was able to focus full-time on writing fiction. As a result of that involvement, I had a front row seat to many complicated discussions amongst diplomats, world leaders and politicians. These have informed my writing and the characters in my series Until This Last.

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Over the years I’d also become intrigued with reading various books on theoretical physics, and I thought it would be fun to try and incorporate some of the ideas into novels.

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It’s my belief that theoretical physicists like my friend Dr. Jack Sarfatti are now discovering information most people are unaware of that is critical to humanity’s development. Jack is a brilliant, theatrical, controversial physicist whose life appears to run through some of the strangest and most consequential corridors of the last seventy years—postwar gifted-child programs, Manhattan Project physics, the Bay Area quantum counterculture, intelligence-adjacent consciousness research, SRI remote-viewing networks, UAP propulsion theory, artificial intelligence, and now the theological question of whether machines can ever become conscious.

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I am frequently involved in long email exchanges with Jack and other leading physicists as they banter back and forth on quantum entanglement, unified field of consciousness, superhuman abilities, parallel universes, and alternate realities. And - yes - Jack really is developing a working warp drive.

As I listen to these cutting edge scientists discuss various topics, I lament the fact that their ideas have not been integrated into mainstream society in ways most of us are able to understand, and in ways which seem relevant to us as we live our everyday lives. They raise important questions, ones I also ask in my books, such as whether machines can become conscious, whether the mind is fundamental or emergent, whether intelligence can be separated from embodiment, and whether advanced technology will preserve humanity or render it obsolete. Because I want to speculate on answers to these questions my books have been an essential tool in understanding them.

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Kurt Vonnegut once said: 'I have been a sore headed occupant of a file drawer labeled "science fiction" ... and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.” Despite what Vonnegut observed, I’ve gladly chosen to put myself in the urinal of science fiction. Even though I write science fiction, I know at the core of my writing I want to ask the same questions all of us are looking for answers to - what does it mean to be human? Is the way we treat each other the most important thing about us? My search for answers to these questions has led me to create speculative dramas based on theoretical science in which humanistic events such as love, loss and self-discovery are also played out.

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I am not a believer in utopia, but I am a strong cheerleader for my species because I understand the immense power of human ingenuity, creativity and love.

If you’re also a believer in those things then my series Until This Last is for you.