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A.O. Wagner’s novels explore the intersection of technology, transcendence, and recovery.
In A.O. Wagner’s shadowy, unsettling trilogy The Karma Kantata, technology reaches its most prophetic and terrifying threshold: a sophisticated gene analysis system that does not merely assess risk or inheritance but predicts—uncannily and with clinical precision—the date of an individual’s death. But unlike the algorithmic doomsday devices of lesser techno-thrillers, Wagner’s creation functions less as a plot gimmick than as an aperture into questions of fate, suffering, and the metaphysics of knowing. It’s high-tech fiction, yes, but with the low hum of something older—ancient, even—beneath it.
The novels follow Dan, a socially awkward software savant and recovering alcoholic, as he grapples with the psychic toll of knowing too much—both about machines and himself. But the real drama unfolds not in flashy chase scenes or sterile labs but in the quiet collisions between code and karma, logic and faith, pain and transcendence. Dan’s struggle is not only his own; it is, in many ways, his creator’s.
“I had the wish or the idea to make something in the intersection of hard science and pure logic on the one hand and the spiritual sphere on the other,” Wagner tells me during a rare interview. The Danish-born author, often described as reclusive—a characterization he neither confirms nor denies—speaks in a measured, almost mathematical cadence, his thoughts emerging with the deliberation of someone debugging something far deeper than software. “Normally we regard those as very distinct and separate, and I’ve always had the idea that it would be interesting to merge the two.”
This merger—between the binary rigidity of computers and the ambiguous vastness of faith—forms what Wagner calls the “core motivation” of his trilogy. The idea that karma, traditionally understood as a moral ledger measured across lifetimes, could be expressed in a data structure is not, for him, far-fetched but inevitable. “The AI, the databases, the relentless logic of code,” he says, “represent the scientific pole. Karma, fate, and the uncanny predictive power, the spiritual.”
If this sounds grandiose, even messianic, it is grounded by a deep vein of autobiography. Dan’s battle with alcoholism is Wagner’s own. “It’s actually my own story for a big part of it,” he admits. A former software developer, Wagner is now twelve years sober. “One of my primary impulses,” he says, “was to share some of the insights that I had gotten from my own transition from struggling with alcohol to being completely recovered.” These insights are rarely delivered in didactic terms. Instead, they are threaded through the trilogy’s characters like a subtle moral subroutine, operating quietly but insistently.
At the center of Wagner’s cosmology is a concept he calls “spiritual mechanics.” It’s a kind of metaphysical operating system—an effort to describe transcendence not in terms of dogma or ritual, but infrastructure. “The universe we perceive is a projection,” he says, “emanating from what I call the ‘Transcendence system.’” He concedes that this system, for lack of a better term, might resemble what others would call God. But for Wagner, it isn’t a question of theology—it’s architecture. “It has to run on some sort of platform,” he insists. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” he adds, quoting Arthur C. Clarke with evident relish. “That’s the background for that phrase.”
Wagner’s reverence for technology, however, is far from uncritical. While he recognizes its immense utility—he speaks fondly of his early years in software development—his novels are shot through with a deep suspicion of where things are headed. “I think something dangerous is happening these years,” he warns. “As machines become more human-like, we risk becoming more android-like.” His critique of transhumanism, that breathless techno-utopianism espoused by Silicon Valley’s immortality chasers, is withering. “Technology,” he says, echoing a line from his third book, “is in opposition to biology.” While he admits this is something of an oversimplification, he believes the sentiment holds: to assume we can embrace the comforts of tech without accounting for its 99 potentially disastrous side effects is, in his view, willful blindness. “Maybe I’m too conservative,” he offers, almost apologetically. “But I think maybe we should have stopped with the telephone.”
This ambivalence also informed his own exit from the tech world. For years, Wagner tried to write fiction on the side, coding by day and plotting by night. But the mind, he found, doesn’t toggle so easily between computation and creation. “I learned the hard way that it took at least a couple of days to change my mindset… and that’s not enough.” In 2022, he quit his job. “It was hard,” he says. “But ultimately satisfying.” Now, his fiction is his sole professional endeavor—though he approaches it, one senses, not as a career but as a calling.
Despite his spiritual ambitions and monkish lifestyle, Wagner is not above the practicalities of modern authorship. He runs ads on Amazon. He participates in webinars. He’s on Goodreads, even Instagram, albeit reluctantly. But the social media performance art, he says, leaves him cold. “The curated versions of ourselves online create this dangerous gap between who we are and who we present,” he says. “That gap can become a kind of psychic poison.”
Still, he promotes his work not to chase sales but to share what he considers a meaningful blueprint for living—one rooted in awareness, humility, and the embrace of meaning over pleasure. “Meaning,” he says, “is so much more valuable than happiness. You can live with some unhappiness and suffering if you achieve the goals that you feel… is your mission.”
For Wagner, that mission is singular: to tell the one story that continues to unfold within him—a story about code and karma, about addiction and awakening, about death and what might lie beyond. When asked if he himself would want to know the precise date of his death, like the characters in his novels, he does not hesitate: “No.” The point, after all, is not knowing when the story ends—but understanding, however fleetingly, what it was about.
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