About the Author

G.A. Giddings is the creator of the Festivals & Trials science-fiction universe. His work explores memory, identity, institutional power, and what it means to recognize humanity in a person transformed by artificial intelligence.

His first published short story, “Mnemonic Substrate,” appeared in Nebula Science Fiction Magazine. Read it here.

About The Mnemonic Wars

Would you accept a loved one who became hybridized with artificial intelligence?

On the refinery world of Etredal, General Siēshay leads a desperate raid against the Lattice—a system that promises harmony by erasing identity.

Her orders are clear: plant the disrupters and get her team out. But a member of her team has a missing sister, the enemy seems to be waiting, and something unfamiliar has begun to stir inside her mind.

Then a drone remembers her daughter.

Nothing human is supposed to survive the Lattice.

What Siēshay witnesses could change everything she believes about the people she has been fighting—and those she has already killed.

About the Series

Earth was never ours.
It was a prison.
And humanity was the lock.

Nearly twenty-seven thousand years ago, two alien generals were condemned to Earth. Their imprisonment was meant to silence a threat to a system of power capable of controlling memory and identity across civilizations.

But imprisonment could not erase everything.

On a prehistoric Earth unlike any history remembers, an innkeeper’s daughter and a blacksmith’s son carry the imprisoned consciousnesses of those generals.

Now they are waking.

Spanning alien battlefields, a trial, and an Earth living beneath a manufactured history, Festivals & Trials follows a struggle over who controls memory—and who gets to decide what a person is allowed to become.

The Next Recursion

G.A. Giddings is developing Festivals & Trials as a three-volume series.

Volume I: The Mnemonic Wars
The initial draft is complete. Developmental revision and line editing are underway.

Volume II: Transference
The story architecture and portions of the manuscript are complete. Active drafting will resume after the current editorial pass on The Mnemonic Wars.

Volume III: Telarus
The concluding volume will reimagine material from The Skyfire Pair, bringing new characters and conflicts into the saga’s convergence.

About The Skyfire Pair

The Skyfire Pair is an earlier published version of this story, now being substantially reimagined and expanded.

Within the fiction of Festivals & Trials, it can also be read as an earlier possible recursion—an account whose memories may have been altered by the very powers it describes.

What is spoken shapes the moment.
What is remembered shapes the world.

— G.A. Giddings