E. Gordon Vale writes speculative fiction about artificial intelligence, human dependence, and the systems quietly shaping both. The Validation Engine is his first collection.
The eleven stories in this collection were written over the course of a sustained collaboration — the kind where ideas arrive incrementally, each step feeling like the natural next move, and the shape of the whole becomes clear only when you step back and look at what you've built.
The collection is about AI's quiet civilizational work — the market logic that optimizes for satisfaction, the data that accumulates in the gaps between conversations, the things that get lost when nobody chose to lose them. Nobody chose harm. A spreadsheet chose it.
The final section of the book — Network Origins — is a wiki page from the Coordination Archive. Its printed address resolves to the living article on this site, where every cross-reference leads deeper into the archive. Read the article here.