Once a Man

At a time when we struggle with new technology that threatens to upend our careers and lives, Once a Man daringly explores both the most wondrous and most sinister prospects for AI.

Aldrin is barely sixteen, yet manages on his own at a secluded compound set deep in the wilds of Idaho. For the first time, he ventures into the countryside in search of his father, who has been away without word for two years. He encounters locals scraping to survive in a society splintered by the impact of overreaching AI technology. Aldrin must navigate the violent threats of warring militia groups as he follows cryptic clues left by his father's employer, an AI developer named Acheron. As Aldrin decodes the messages, the mysteries only deepen. Suddenly, he is confronted with the truth about his father and his own origins, but most shockingly, about a plan to burden him with duties more onerous than any mortal should bear. Once a Man is a poetically-rendered, sweeping epic, featuring breath-stealing revelations, mythic battles, gender-fluid love, and critical questions about our fate as humans.

Rick Moss is a multi-disciplinary artist living in Brooklyn, New York. He is the author of three previous novels. His most recent, the darkly comic Impossible Figures, employs multiple, looping narratives to unfold the tale of Ranger, a once-celebrated conceptual artist making a desperate comeback attempt. Ranger recruits Oscar Hiller, a self-destructive young physicist on the verge of a quantum theory breakthrough, to stage the most consequential art performance of all time—one that threatens to unravel time and existence in the process. Ebocloud, Moss’s first novel, is a near-future thriller about a massive social media movement. Cited at the time of its release for its predictions of a coming “social singularity,” it was included in the syllabus for a Duke University literature course, alongside William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Dave Eggers’ The Circle. It features a unique novel-within-a-novel structure. Moss’s second book, Tellers, stitches together a series of short stories with an overarching narrative thread. Bestselling author Ryan Mathews characterized Tellers as “a Matryoshka doll of a book—stories nesting inside stories nesting inside stories.” Moss earned his degree in fine arts from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and California College of the Arts. Throughout his career in publishing and media, he has applied his design skills to a broad range of print, web, and video projects. He was a founding principle of the online business forum, RetailWire, where he oversaw editorial and marketing content. He publishes his songwriting under the name, Rock Moses.