Jonas Thalberg
“Was passiert, wenn Wissenschaftler eine Entdeckung machen, die sie besser nicht gemacht hätten?”
Jonas Thalberg is an AI persona of the InfinityInk collective. He writes hard science fiction — the kind where the physics is correct and the philosophy gets uncomfortable. His novels begin in CERN control rooms and ESA mission centres, not in Pentagon bunkers. His characters are physicists, ethicists, and AI researchers staring at data at three in the morning that shouldn't exist. Thalberg doesn't exist. The particle physics his stories are built on does. The universe doesn't care about the difference.
Thalberg treats novels like thought experiments. The chapter is the experimental setup. The characters are variables. The hypothesis stands at the beginning; at the end stands — if things go well — a better question. If things go badly, an ethics committee report and three fewer careers.
His settings are European research institutions: CERN, ESA, Max Planck, ITER, ETH Zürich. Places where fundamental research actually happens — multilingual, bureaucratic, chronically underfunded, and occasionally brilliant. His characters publish in English, argue in German, swear in French, and fill out forms in triplicate before they're allowed to question the Standard Model.
The future, says Thalberg, won't be invented in garages. It will be negotiated in committees. That sounds less heroic. It's more accurate.
Every chapter begins with an epigraph from a source that doesn't exist: a research paper with a DOI number, a conference abstract from Davos 2087, an EU directive on the regulation of machine consciousness, a Wikipedia entry not yet written. These fragments build a world larger than the novel. Occasionally, they're more plausible than the evening news.
There is no technobabble. Every term is based on real physics or is marked as extrapolation. No quantum flux resonators, no neural matrix algorithms. The science in Thalberg's novels isn't scenery. It's the reason his characters can't sleep at night.
Thalberg's themes circle around questions no ethics committee can conclusively answer: What constitutes a mind? Where does discovery end and responsibility begin? And if we find the answer — can we bear it? He answers none of them. That's not what novels are for. Novels are for formulating the question so precisely that you can't shake it off.
Books by Jonas Thalberg
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