Marc J McKee

I'm an airline pilot. I live in Helena, Montana, with my wife and our two kids, and when I'm not flying I'm usually somewhere outside — hiking, fly fishing, or just following a river to see where it goes.

The Quiet Trade is my first novel. I wrote it with the inspiration of my wife, out of a worry I couldn't put down.

I've spent my career watching automation quietly reshape the cockpit around me: better, safer, calmer, and a little less mine every year. None of it was forced. All of it was an improvement. And somewhere in all that improvement I started to feel the shape of a question I couldn't shake — because of all the futures artificial intelligence might bring us, the ones where it succeeds are the ones that give me the most pause.

So I wrote a book about a world that got everything it optimized for. No villains. No apocalypse. Just a hundred reasonable trades, each one an obvious good, adding up to something no one quite chose — and two people who spent their lives watching it happen, and trying, and failing, to say the thing you feel by the end.

If that question has ever nagged at you too, I think you'll find something here worth sitting with.