Hubris Rising: When Science Fiction Starts Reading Like a Policy Brief
On the launch of Book 2 in the Echoes of Tomorrow series — and why storytelling belongs in the rooms where we decide the future of technology.
When I released Synthetic Eden last month, I thought I was publishing a science fiction novel. Turns out, I was writing a policy memo in disguise.
That first book — the story of scientists escaping an engineered ecological collapse — hit a nerve because it sounded uncomfortably plausible. Readers told me it didn’t feel like the future; it felt like a Tuesday.
That’s where the Echoes of Tomorrow project began — not as entertainment, but as an experiment. What if fiction could do what white papers can’t? What if we could use story as a testbed for the world we’re already building — a place to explore the consequences of the technologies reshaping how we live, govern, and survive?
Hubris Rising, book two in the series, continues that experiment. It’s less about escaping the end of the world and more about managing what comes after. It’s about how power, science, and policy collide once survival turns into strategy.
From the Lab to the Colony
Without spoiling anything, Hubris Rising drops us into the next phase of the human experiment. The colonists who fled a dying Earth are now trying to build a functioning civilization on an alien planet called DaVinci.
And, like clockwork, the same questions follow them. Who gets to make the rules? Who decides what counts as “ethical” science when survival is on the line? And how much control over biology, technology, and people is too much?
These aren’t distant hypotheticals. They’re the same debates we’re having today about AI alignment, biotechnology regulation, and the geopolitics of fusion energy. The same push-pull between innovation and accountability, just played out in a world where the stakes are condensed to a single colony and a single genome.
That’s the heart of the Echoes universe: every breakthrough comes with a bill. And the question isn’t whether we can pay it — it’s who gets the invoice.
Why This Story Exists Inside TCIP
When I launched The Connected Ideas Project, it was never just about tracking emerging tech — it was about making sense of how those technologies rearrange our lives and our governments.
TCIP lives at the intersection of science, technology, and policy. The Echoes series is the fictional branch of that same mission — a narrative sandbox to explore what happens when those systems go off script.
The technologies in Hubris Rising aren’t imaginary. They’re FABRIC technologies — Fusion, AI, Biotech, Robotics, and Innovative Computing — the same set we talk about every week in TCIP.
What fiction lets me do is speed-run the policy cycle. Instead of waiting twenty years for a regulation to catch up to a breakthrough, I can drop readers into the world where it’s already happened — and ask them to live with the consequences.
That’s what makes Hubris Rising a TCIP story. It’s a case study disguised as a space opera.
The Real-World Parallel: Tech Policy as a Human Experiment
You don’t have to move to another planet to see what this looks like. We’re already living through our own “post-Earth moment.”
AI systems are making decisions we can’t fully audit. Synthetic biology is rewriting the logic of life faster than our ethics boards can meet. Quantum computing, robotics, and fusion are reshaping defense and energy policy in real time.
And in every one of those fields, the same question sits at the center:
When does innovation cross the line from problem-solving to self-replication?
That’s what Phoebe Makinde, the young scientist at the heart of Hubris Rising, represents — the policy nightmare of a well-intentioned genius. She’s what happens when a technology leader stops asking for permission because she’s tired of watching bureaucracy stall survival.
You can swap her genome lab for an AI startup or a fusion facility, and the moral math doesn’t change. Once the capability exists, someone will use it. The only real question is how we govern it.
That’s not fiction. That’s the daily work of technology policy.
Responsible Innovation Is a Contact Sport
Every week, TCIP readers hear me talk about responsible progress — about “Violet Teaming,” our term for stress-testing the moral consequences of technology before it hits the real world.
Writing Hubris Rising became my own Violet Teaming exercise. Every storyline was a way to ask:
How would we regulate science if our survival depended on breaking the rules?
What happens when regulation and innovation move at different speeds?
How much ethical compromise can a society survive before it stops being one?
Those questions aren’t theoretical. They’re showing up in the rooms where we decide how AI models train, how genetic data moves across borders, and how fusion projects intersect with national security.
If fiction can make those dilemmas tangible before they become headlines, then maybe it can help policymakers feel the stakes — not just read them.
Stories as Policy Infrastructure
There’s a quiet truth I’ve learned after years working across tech and government: we don’t just legislate based on data — we legislate based on stories.
Policy decisions are narrative decisions. The mental model we hold about what’s possible, what’s dangerous, and what’s worth protecting shapes everything that follows.
That’s why storytelling belongs in this work. Because every time we deploy a new capability — from CRISPR to ChatGPT — we’re also writing the story society will tell about it.
Hubris Rising isn’t a warning about technology. It’s a reminder that governance has to evolve with it.
Science and policy aren’t enemies. They’re co-authors. The only way to avoid catastrophe is to make sure they’re writing the same chapter.
The Fiction-Policy Feedback Loop
I’ve started to think of the Echoes of Tomorrow series and TCIP as two sides of the same coin.
TCIP is where we dissect real technologies: how AI chips are driving power grids, how synthetic biology is reshaping defense logistics, how fusion projects are quietly becoming geopolitical flashpoints.
Echoes is where we humanize those forces — where we explore what it feels like to live through them.
Both are experiments in connecting ideas across domains. Both assume that the future will be built not just by scientists or policymakers, but by everyone affected by their decisions.
That’s why this second book matters. It’s not just a continuation of a story — it’s a continuation of the TCIP mission: to make science, technology, and policy personal. To show that these decisions aren’t abstract; they live in our food, our health, our data, our kids’ schools, and our shared sense of what “progress” means.
Looking Ahead
If Synthetic Eden was the story of escape, Hubris Rising is the story of governance. It’s about what happens when innovation meets politics, and survival demands compromise.
It’s about how human systems bend under the weight of the technologies they create.
And maybe that’s what every frontier is — not a race to invent, but a test of whether our institutions, our ethics, and our empathy can keep up.
That’s the thread I’ll keep pulling in both Echoes and TCIP — how to balance technological optimism with institutional realism. How to go fast, responsibly.
Because the technologies we build are already shaping the policies that will define us. The real challenge is making sure they serve the future we actually want to live in.
— Titus