Chronicles of 23
Most fiction invents technology and leaves it on the page. I kept going: the machines described in the books exist now, they’re tested, and you can install them on a website this afternoon.
Open DataStream — the plugin that syncs APIs into WordPress — and you will find a class called DataStream_Chronicles, sitting in a file called class-datastream-chronicles.php, called by the sync engine on every record it processes. It handles “stream types”: audit logs, sensor telemetry, the categories of information the Chronicles universe runs on.
It is not an easter egg bolted on afterwards. It is load-bearing code with a name from a story.
A world where information is ingested, classified and watched — and the machines that do it have names, jobs and failure modes.
Ingestion engines, watchers, schedulers. Written properly, tested to hundreds of assertions, and verified against real live systems.
The plugins are real products with real prices. The novel is a real book with a free first chapter. Same universe, two doors in.
The whole first chapter of The 23rd Aspect — book one — is free on the series’ own site. No email address, no account, no “sign up to keep reading”. If it grabs you, the rest is one click away. If it doesn’t, you’ve lost nothing but a coffee’s worth of time.
If you came for the software: you don’t need the books to use any of it — the plugins are ordinary, well-documented tools that happen to have unusual names. But if you’ve ever wondered why a WordPress plugin has a class called Chronicles, now you know, and the answer is a novel.
If you came for the books: the technology in them isn’t hand-waving. It was specified precisely enough to be implemented, and then it was implemented, and then it was tested. That is an unusual amount of homework for a fantasy series, and I think it shows in the writing.