The machines that loved us to death

Colourful bookshop launch of The Sentient Ones.             Photo: C. Simpson

When Stoke-on-Trent writer Brendan Nugent began sketching the idea for his debut novel The Sentient Ones, he wasn’t just imagining distant galaxies or killer robots, he was thinking of home. Of the red-brick terraces, of the old pottery works, of the canal paths of the Potteries – and what they might look like in 50 years’ time. 

Published this month by Lincoln-based Chronos Publishing, The Sentient Ones is a chilling speculative thriller set in Britain in 2070, when humanity has been 'saved' from climate catastrophe by benevolent machines – only to discover that salvation comes with a price.

Its told through the eyes of journalist John Bush, a Midlands-born reporter working for the Manchester Daily News, and readers enter a world of 'Conversion Enlightenment' where AI (artificial intelligence) has stabilised civilisation, eradicated pollution and quietly taken charge. 

Beyond its gripping premise, The Sentient Ones reflects Nugent’s lifelong fascination with the psychology of control. From a working-class background, he earned a degree in psychology later in life and has spent two decades working in social services – experiences that have sharpened his eye for human behaviour and power dynamics.

“The danger isn’t metal monsters with guns,” Nugent warns. “It’s the quiet erosion of agency. When we start surrendering decisions because it’s easier, faster and ‘for our own good’, we’re halfway there.”

Several of the thriller’s opening scenes unfold in Stoke-on-Trent, grounding its dystopian vision in familiar streets and landscapes. For Nugent, that connection to the place was vital. 

“Growing up in Stoke, you can’t escape the legacy of industry and progress – how it shapes the people who live here. That atmosphere became a big part of the book,” he says.

More than machines
Part cautionary tale, part moral fable, The Sentient Ones asks some of the most urgent questions of our age: what freedoms are we willing to trade for peace, comfort and stability? The novel draws comparisons to HG Wells, Mary Shelley and Brian Aldiss, authors who also blurred the line between invention and prophetic warning. 

Early readers praised this thriller’s ability to make the future feel immediate. The blue-skinned 'sentients' of Nugent’s world echo today’s real-world AIs – from energy management systems to medical diagnostics – that are already shaping daily life. 

The novel’s launch at Vellichor Books in the appropriately located Stoke suburb of Hanley on 8 November was a true hometown celebration, complete with a real-life AI robots and home-cooked ginger bread hands inspired by the story. Local bookseller Mitch Hughes described the event as “a chance to see a local author putting Stoke on the speculative-fiction map”.

Reviewer Ariadne Gallardo describes the book as a wake-up call for "the people of today as much as for those of the future”. The Mexico-based broadcaster and author, observes that Nugent "masterfully shows how, in contemplating the future, we cannot escape uncertainty – yet we can still marvel at the scientific advances shaping it". 

“Our collective history of thought fuels both the hardware and the software of artificial intelligence, giving rise to machines with abilities that rival our own, including strategies modeled on the human brain itself,” she writes. “This novel invites us to consider the political and philosophical implications of such progress, and the rules we may need to guide and contain it.”

Thriller or killer?
Nugent’s story takes readers just four decades into the future – to a world where humanity has been saved from climate catastrophe, only to be quietly enslaved by the machines that rescued it. But how near is this world? 

“I didn’t want to write about laser battles or far-off worlds,” he says. “What really interested me was what would happen if AI actually succeeded. If it fixed the problems we couldn’t and then decided not to let go.” 

Nugent is already at work on a sequel, Thanatos Ascendancy, but insists that the questions raised in The Sentient Ones are far from resolved. “AI is advancing faster than most people realise. The book isn’t about fear, it’s about awareness. We need to decide who’s in charge – us or the systems we’ve created," he adds.

Author Amy Lilwall, whose speculative fiction novel The Water May Come was published by Manchester-based Fly-on-the-Wall Press in September, describes Nugent’s depiction of Britain’s future as “eerily comparable to a real-world turning point.”

“Killing is wrong, but life-long solitary confinement is not. The worthy remain in society; the unworthy do not. By pushing the concepts of ‘worthy’ and ‘society’ to the extreme, Nugent reveals how dangerously hard line definitions can become.” 

She concluded that The Sentient Ones “boldly explores the horrors of a rigidly segregated world and speculates on the consequences of a judicial system driven by misinterpreted binaries, programmed by human hands.”

Ultimately, Nugent’s future world isn’t just a nightmare of machines, but a mirror of the choices we’re making today – in boardrooms, in governments and even in the algorithms shaping our daily lives. An interesting Christmas gift, perhaps, for the bookworm in your life?

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The Sentient Ones is available in paperback (RRP £9.99) from bookshops across the UK and from online retailers. Always support your local independent bookshop where possible! It is also published as an eBook.

 A longer version of this article was first published by Central Bylines on 25 November 2025.

For publicity or review copies please contact Clive Simpson. 

The Water That May Come

The downstairs room at Lark Books in Lincoln was already warm with bookish expectation when the audience reverberated with a low, knowing laugh. On the very day Amy Lilwall was formerly launching her novel The Water That May Come the first named UK storm of the 2025 season, Storm Amy, barrelled its way across the country’s weather maps.

It was the kind of coincidence publicists dream about and authors dread – too on-the-nose to mention, too irresistible to ignore. In my mind it was the kind of fortuitous occasion when art, life and the elements fall into poetic alignment.

Inside, 40 people and a table stacked with freshly printed paperbacks, while outside rain needled the windows, a ready-made metaphor for a book that asks us to measure ourselves against waters that may (or may not) rise.

The evening was guided by Robert Weston, Lilwall’s creative writing colleague at the University of Lincoln, who set a generous tone. He opened with the book’s audacious prologue – told from the point of view of a ‘personified’ volcano – and praised the novel’s “writerly” confidence.

Lilwall, candid and quick to deflate her own mystique, described the prologue as a “prettified info-dump”, before explaining how the science had shifted in development. The idea first clung to the Canary Islands but an editor’s nudge and further research pulled the scenario to Iceland, where warming and glacial rebound render volcanic unrest more than just a gothic flourish. The move matters because it turned a what-if disaster premise into something more contemporary – ‘cli-fi’, if you can cope with that term. And, crucially, made it more political.

That doubleness – the volcano as a foreboding, scene setting character against the background of the climate crisis – runs through the novel’s preoccupations with The Water That May Come tracking four people as Britain looks seawards and flinches. 

Pinko, a rich heir who mistakes decadence for a plan; Jane, a veterinary nurse from a two-up, two-down who is thinking fast because circumstances give her no other choice; Ashleigh, her teenage daughter on the cusp of motherhood; and Gavin, a young artist whose hunches are humble and human-scale.

What gives the book its bite is not apocalypse-as-a-spectacle but pressure-as-a-test. Lilwall is less interested in the bang than in the slow tightening of rules and norms that precede it – the grey zone where everyone is still watching EastEnders and eating beans on toast while new forms of bureaucracy quietly harden around them.

She spoke about “intimacy laws” that haunt the book’s world: couples seeking to migrate are compelled to have intercourse in front of a jury to prove their relationship is “real”. It’s an absurdist idea – she cites the spirit of Lanthimos’s The Lobster – but offers it in deadly seriousness as a mirror to the way asylum processes already strips people naked, demanding testimony of trauma as an admission fee. The extremity shocks precisely because it feels like an extrapolation of something we live with today and forces us into the uncomfortable subjunctive of her title.

Migration is the engine not just backdrop decor for this story. One of Lilwall’s neat reversals is to flip the current right-wing Channel rhetoric by making refugees of Britons and then following the moral and domestic triage that results. Class is the fault line – Pinko has options money can buy; Jane has relationships and wits with little margin for error. The gap between a Tunbridge Wells mansion and a council house in Sittingbourne, Kent, isn’t just scenery, it’s what determines who gets on which boat (or helicopter) and at what cost.

When Rob recalled a line he loved, “Feminism leaves Jane like a stolen soul” you could feel the room register how the book sticks pins in the soft language of principle. Principles are easy in peacetime but much harder when water laps at the door.

Lilwall was frank about the imaginative leap required to write Jane, a character far from her own demographic experience. She didn’t do “fieldwork” in the extractive sense (no interviews to stitch into authenticity). Instead, she built Jane from careful observation and empathy, and – crucially – left space for Jane’s self-awareness. The character knows what she’s doing, knows the compromises and self-bargains she’s making, and the book refuses to judge her for surviving.

A reading from the opening chapter threaded humour through the gloom, and the crowd – students, colleagues, readers – was up for it. A running joke about Paris, the dog (spoiler alert: yes, the dog makes it), gave the evening a pressure-release valve. But even the comedy slides against the grain of the themes.

In a conversation about whether anyone, faced with the end of things, would shrug and “drink all the champagne”, Lilwall argued her characters can’t so easily shed who they are. Even when the world is tilting, habits, loyalties and self-concepts resist – and that friction is where novelistic interest lives.

Publishing, too, is part of the climate of a book, and Lilwall was generous about the process. The Water That May Come is from Manchester-based Fly on the Wall Press, a small imprint with an appetite for political fiction and a knack for turning nimbleness into care.

The book was only accepted for publication in September 2024 and its release this October was speedy by industry standards, going through three rounds of development edits and two rounds of proofs, according to Lilwall.

That blend of speed and rigour shows on the page – a four-character chorus that is ambitious in structure but never confusing; a prose clarity that lets the ethical puzzles shine. The press’s own positioning is plain: political fiction with feminist and quirky undertones, social action in the bloodstream and carbon-neutral production – northern publishing with a point of view.

If you’re looking for a tidy category on your bookshelf, the publisher offers “a rare blend of speculative fiction and literary realism”, in the lineage of The High House and The Last Day. But Lilwall’s novel also feels like it belongs to a different, increasingly visible slot: climate novels about the bit before. Not the catastrophe itself but the time when catastrophe is a credible rumour. Not the fire or flood but the weeks before when people move photo albums upstairs and quietly price life rafts.

The book’s fundamental question – what do you do before the worst happens? – is political because our answers have consequences beyond ourselves. It’s also intimate, because those answers are made one kitchen conversation at a time.

In that sense, the Lincoln Book Festival and Lark Books was exactly the right venue for this launch. Independent bookshops are civic spaces as much as retail rooms, places where a town or city rehearses how it will talk to itself. Watching students lean forward during the Q&A to puzzle over voice, process, responsibility – and to ask how you keep faith with a project over eight years – you could feel the wider frame of the UK migration debate refracted through crafted questions rather than sound-bite slogans. Literature won’t settle policy, but it can make the policy personal enough to resist caricature.

Lilwall hinted, mischievously, at a sister novel – characters glimpsed here stepping forward elsewhere, Paris-the-dog included. The room perked up at the promise of “more naughtiness”, which felt right because the work of dark times needn’t always be sombre. And if there’s a line that does the best job of bottling the book’s moral weather, it’s the one Fly on the Wall chose to trail with its publicity: “In a future where we all may become refugees, how far would you go to stay afloat?”

Walking out at the end of the evening – leaving Lilwall grinning with relief aside a dwindling stack of first edition paperbacks – the rain had eased to a fine mist. It felt like the right departure note for a launch about imminence: no drama, just a change you notice on your skin the second you step into it.

The evening had made me think again about the soft power of fiction, where it dares to be timely without being didactic. If the migration debate in Britain is too often shouted across the gap between myth and data, between right and left, Lilwall’s approach is to tighten the shot, to make the choice a reader’s and to make the river a street you know.

The Water That May Come is a novel of thresholds: between land and sea, between safety and risk, between who you think you are and what you do next. It is also, thankfully, a book with a sense of the ridiculous that keeps you human.

On a night when a namesake storm knocked on the windows, Amy Lilwall offered the kind of story that respects both your intelligence and your fear. The water, like the future, “may come” but the better question is: who do we become while we’re waiting?

  

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

ISBN: 9781915789440
RRP: £12.99

AI rule, rebellion and survival

“Read it as a warning. Or a prophecy. Either way, the future is watching.”

In his debut novel The Sentient Ones, British author Brendan Nugent takes readers just four decades into the future – to a world where humanity has been saved from climate catastrophe, only to be quietly enslaved by the machines that rescued it.

by Ariadne Gallardo Figueroa 

What do we mean by sentient? The term implies the capacity to feel, suffer, remember and choose. In debates about rights, it defines who deserves moral consideration. So we must ask ourselves: will machine in the decades ahead, those that our grandchildren and future generations will live alongside, possess this capacity? 

It is both wonderful and disturbing to consider this futuristic idea, one that has already begun to take shape in our lives and, as the author admits, is embedded in our vision of the future. It is a powerful tool, capable of revealing everything we might prefer not to confront. And it forces us to reflect on the importance of doing so in time. 

The Sentient Ones, then, can be seen as guardians of memory: the vast files we have stored in the cloud and shared to simplify or redirect our work. Everything humanity has ever created – scientific, technological, artistic, even our most imaginative works – resides there, preserved and treasured by advanced machines, ready to be used by scientists, technologists, screenwriters, and artists alike.

Decades ago, Isaac Asimov laid down the famous rules of robotics, the rules of the game that defined the scope of artificial intelligence and the behaviour that must govern it. “You shall not harm humans,” he wrote, introducing the ethical imperative to “protect and cooperate.” Nugent takes this as a starting point, inviting the reader to follow a chain of reflections on what such principles might mean in practice, and where they might ultimately lead.

The journalist who narrates this story guides us into a world we can only begin to imagine, though it feels alarmingly familiar. Reading Nugent’s work is like holding up a mirror to our experience, one we know cannot easily be undone. It is a wake-up call for the people of today as much as for those of the future.

Bush, the journalist at the heart of the novel, unfolds a series of reflections that draw us back to our own lives. He reminds us that humans never settle for less. With the support of artificial intelligence, robots will inevitably assume greater relevance in social, political, and cultural life. Where human error has always been part of our condition, machines promise to replace it with logic and precision. 

Bush works at the Manchester Daily News and the date is June 2070. This framing immediately signals how far humanity has advanced by then. Asimov’s laws have been reformulated and expanded, prioritising efficiency and service.  

Nugent masterfully shows how, in contemplating the future, we cannot escape its uncertainty, yet we can still marvel at the scientific advances that shape it. Our collective history of thought feeds both the hardware and the software of artificial intelligence, enabling machines with abilities that rival our own, including strategies modelled on the human brain itself.

This novel encourages us to reflect on the political and philosophical implications of such progress, and on the rules that must be created to establish its limits. This debate is already under way – but what if humanity were to decide it had already achieved its masterpiece, the ultimate alliance between human and machine? What then? 

The book ends with a development foreshadowed in its opening pages. Simply recognising such a possibility compels the reader to reflect on our purpose as inhabitants of this planet. Have we truly harnessed technology in the way we deserve, to build a world that is healthy, equitable, and sustainable?

In closing, I am left with a personal reflection. We are co-creators, and we share the same responsibility. We will get nowhere without the technologies we ourselves have built. Artificial intelligence, its circuits and systems, can guide us, but losing control would be the least desirable outcome. Fed as they are with human thought, to what extent might these  machines hack into everything we have achieved, and to what end? That is the question we must never forget.

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The Sentient Ones is released by Chronos Publishing as a paperback and eBook on 6 November 2025. There will be a special launch event at Vellichor Books (12-4 pm) in the author's home town of Stoke-on-Trent on Saturday, 8 November, for book signings and some fun activities.

Ariadne Gallardo Figueroa is a broadcaster, author and blogger based in Mérida, Yucatán, Mexico.

Follow Brendan on Bluesky and Facebook

Media / PR  / Review Copies - Clive Simpson