Science fiction about compliance, surveillance, and the quiet machinery of control.
For readers of Ishiguro, Le Guin, and VanderMeer.
The Null Accord Trilogy
What makes you reach for something,
even when every system you’ve built tells you to stop?
The Null Accord is set in a world where compliance isn’t enforced through violence, it’s engineered through convenience. The Hum, a neurological control system, keeps citizens synchronised, productive, and unable to remember what they’ve lost. Those who deviate are not punished. They are optimised. Those who resist optimisation are deleted.
Three books trace a single thread: what happens when someone keeps reaching, for a memory, for a person, for a signal from something ancient buried beneath the earth, when every system around them has decided that reaching is the problem.
The Ghost Frequency
The system doesn’t need to punish you. It only needs you to stop reaching.
Book 1
The Witness Below
It doesn’t want to know what you’re reaching for. It wants to know what makes you reach.
“Three thousand people. Eleven thousand years.
One question no civilisation has survived answering.“
The Null Accord · Angus Hale
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Angus Hale writes science fiction about compliance, surveillance, and the quiet machinery of control. His work sits at the intersection of literary fiction and speculative world-building, more concerned with what people feel inside a system than with how the system works.
He grew up in Australia, close enough to the ocean that the sound of it still shows up in his prose. He lives with Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS), a nervous system disorder affecting the neck and arm. His own body taught him what it means to exist inside a system operating without your consent. When Ethan’s Grafts fire in the cervical vertebrae in The Ghost Frequency, the pain geography is not imagined. The experience of living inside a malfunctioning system and living inside a controlling one, he has said, is not as different as you might expect.
He reads Ishiguro, Le Guin, and anyone who writes about power as though it were weather. Something you live inside, not something you fight. The technologies in The Null Accord are not speculative. Every system in the trilogy, from ambient compliance engineering to predictive social scoring to neural-interface memory modulation, already exists in some form. He researched how convenience becomes control before anyone notices, then asked what it looks like in forty years if nobody stops it.
The Null Accord trilogy is a 311,000-word work spanning three novels. It took years to write and was revised extensively before publication. He doesn’t talk much about the process. He’d rather the books did that.
He has no social media presence and no particular interest in acquiring one.
For readers of Station Eleven, Never Let Me Go, The Dispossessed, and Annihilation. This is not genre fiction that apologises for being literary. It is literary fiction that happens to take place in a world that hasn’t been built yet.
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