Today’s Women in SF&F Month guest is Veronica G. Henry! Her short fiction includes “Lessons in Virtual Reality for Wayward Women” in Many Worlds and “A Terminal Kind of Love” in FIYAH Literary Magazine. She is also the author of the historical fantasy novel Bacchanal, which was a Manly Wade Wellman Award finalist in 2022, and the near-future fantasy books in The Scorched Earth duology, which begins with The Canopy Keepers. Her latest novel is The People’s Library, a science fiction fantasy book following a curator of digital historical figures in near-future Cleveland—and I’m excited she’s here today to share about one of its main themes in “The Birthplace of Consciousness.”

About The People’s Library:

A thought-provoking science fiction fantasy set in near-future Cleveland that follows a reluctant curator of digital human consciousness who must uncover twisted secrets and navigate ethical quandaries and dangers when anti-technology rebels attack the futuristic library.

Echo London never wanted to be the curator of the People’s Library, a digital collection of human consciousness. But when she’s assigned as its head librarian, Echo is entrusted with humanity’s greatest minds and historical figures, all of whom have been recreated through controversial consciousness-capturing technology that lets visitors interact with the dead.

But an anti-tech rebellion is stirring. When a rebel attack results in tragedy, a mysterious woman wearing an ancient death mask leaves behind cryptic final words for Echo: It all begins with nothing. Caught between the resistance and a potentially virtual evolution, Echo begins to fear that there’s more to her job than meets the eye and the mind. There are secrets here. And the People’s Library may be less of a promise of things to come than a warning of the danger that lurks beneath the surface. Now the fate of humanity lies in uncovering the truth.

The Birthplace of Consciousness
by Veronica G. Henry

One of the central themes of my novel, The People’s Library, is the intersection of artificial general intelligence and human consciousness. In fact, it’s an interrogation of the idea that at some point in the future we may have to contend with that simple but unsettling question: what if the two were merged?

My novel imagines a near-future library where digital copies of humanity’s most interesting historical figures are reproduced. Using AGI’s access to the exponential data points that exist for us all, it generates interactive, arguably sentient replicas. Yes, at the People’s Library, the dead can speak. But while developing the story, I realized that the deeper question wasn’t about the technology. It was about origins.

What is the source of awareness itself?

As part of my research, I read Charles Seife’s Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea, a book about the fascinating history and physics of the number zero. It’s easy to discount this unusual digit because at first glance, it refers to, well, nothing. And that’s precisely why it garnered such fear and opposition. For centuries mathematicians and philosophers resisted it. One famous critic was Aristotle, who rejected the idea because he denied the existence of nothingness, or a void in the world. It wasn’t until centuries later that a 7th century Indian mathematician, Brahmagupta, developed rules for arithmetic involving zero. Without this much maligned number, there is no calculus, no binary code, and nothing of the digital world we have today.

Which means the entire technological premise of The People’s Library, the possibility of storing consciousness, rests on a symbol for nothing.

The physics surrounding zero made the idea even stranger. In quantum theory, empty space isn’t really empty. The vacuum is bursting with activity. Particles appear and disappear constantly, flickering briefly into existence before dissolving again. Seife describes them as “tiny Cheshire cats,” winking in and out of reality.

In other words, even nothingness is busy.

That idea began to shape how I approached consciousness in the novel. If the vacuum of space is full of potential, if particles can briefly emerge from what appears to be nothing, then why not consciousness? Before thoughts, memories, or identity, there could be a kind of mental zero. An unknowable substrate out of which awareness arises.

In The People’s Library, the archive preserves digital minds that behave like the people they once were. They remember things. They have personalities. Needs and curiosities. But a question lingers in the background of the story: are these preserved minds truly the same consciousness, or are they something more like those quantum particles, brief reappearances generated by data points? And another question I still ponder: where does consciousness live before it finds a home in a person?

Writing this book was my most challenging yet. It made me realize how little we understand the origins of awareness. Technology may allow us to record memories or simulate personalities, but consciousness itself still feels mysterious. It appears suddenly in each of us, persists for a lifetime, and then disappears again.

Like a particle from the vacuum.

The concept of zero helped me think about that mystery in a new way. Nothingness isn’t necessarily empty. It may just be the one thing that allows everything else to exist.

In that sense, the People’s Library isn’t just a repository of minds. It’s an attempt, perhaps an impossible one, to capture the sparks that rise out of nothing.

Veronica G. Henry is the author of The People’s Library, The Scorched Earth duology, The Mambo Reina Mysteries, and Bacchanal. Her work has debuted at #1 on multiple Amazon bestseller charts, was an editors’ pick for Best Fantasy, and shortlisted for the Silver Falchion and Manly Wade Wellman awards. She is a Viable Paradise alum. Her stories have appeared in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Many Worlds, and FIYAH Literary Magazine.