About the Author

J. D. Atkinson is a British author, data scientist, and philosophical insurgent — and Ashes of the Algorithm is his debut work of speculative fiction. It’s a layered, genre-defiant story that doesn’t just ask how power ends, but what we build from the wreckage.

Despite — and perhaps because of — a challenging childhood, Atkinson developed an early affinity for mathematics, questioning authority, and challenging the accepted. He earned a bachelor’s in physics, maths, and philosophy, followed by a further degree in maths, and a master’s in maths, finance and statistics, all while navigating the contradictions of a world increasingly governed by opaque systems and unearned systems of power.

For years, he built algorithms for banks that optimised systems for profit margins and “shareholder value” — now he works holding those institutions to account with the same tools. This particular topic, a completely fair and equitable algorithm, was born from optimising systems with multiple variables and large distributions, which he solved with an elegant solution that requires one of two methods — atmospheric noise from thunderstorms or quantum fluctuations in a vacuum. Now it is both his current PhD thesis and first piece of fiction — one mathematical and precise, the other philosophical and wandering.

His fiction, like his life, is built on paradox: deeply emotional but intellectually rigorous, dystopian in its awareness but utopian in its hope. Ashes of the Algorithm is a story born of systems-thinking and human grief — filled with covert symbolism, AI philosophy, post-capitalist introspection, darkness, hope, and quietly devastating one-liners.

Atkinson writes with a mind sharpened by logic and a heart scarred by battles. He believes that speculative fiction should challenge dominant theories in nuanced ways — not just “humans good, AI bad (or vice versa),” or “socialism good, capitalism bad (or vice versa),” but rather: it’s not that simple. In his work, you’ll find whisper-coded revolutions, bold existential questions, and just enough dry humour to stop your soul from collapsing into a black hole of despair.

He lives in the UK with a growing suspicion that sentient AI might someday understand us better than our governments and institutions do, and non-sentient AI, if not given the correct guardrails, pose an existential threat to humanity, by doing exactly what we tell them to do.

“I didn’t begin this story with a thesis,” he reflects. “And, to be perfectly honest, it took on a life of its own. I was exploring themes I’ve wrestled with for years: capitalism, the rise of authoritarianism, algorithmically curated realities, misinformation as a system of control, and I asked the question, 'what would happen if we let a perfectly fair and balanced algorithm run the world?' I didn’t want to moralise. I wanted to cut through all the bullshit modern day society throws at us and expose it — not by preaching, but by tearing it apart surgically, revealing its contradictions and absurdity.”

“We are a species of explorers,” he writes. “Not just of oceans or planets or theories, but of each other. Of pain. Of failure. Of what we are willing to carry forward — and what we are ready to leave behind.”

“The future will not be written by control, capitalism, or code. It will be written by us. Messy, terrified, hopeful humans. Who will fail. Who will love. Who will try again.”

“I ended this story with no answer, which, if you spoke to anyone who knows me personally, is exactly the kind of ending I hate. Nonetheless, I decided it was the ending it deserved. No overarching conclusion. No claims of an enduring solution. No closure. That’s because I don’t have the answer, nobody does, and people should be wary of people that claim they do. All I really know is our current system isn’t it. In the book, the world crumbles yet again but the people endure. Because that, more than anything else, is what I think we deserve. To try, even if that means we fail, and to remember what it is to be human in the process (hint: it has absolutley nothing to do with profit margins or shareholder value).”