Meet Esteban Lopez: science fiction from the inside of a life

For readers looking for a new science-fiction author, the useful question is what kind of future they want to enter. Some stories begin with another planet. The Girl Who Knew My Mind begins closer to home: a pattern someone notices, a mind she thinks she understands, and the possibility that her senses are showing her more than she can explain.

Esteban Lopez is a psychiatrist and novelist whose work explores consciousness, perception, neurodiversity and the institutions that seek to define and control the mind. Drawing on years of reflection on the nature of the self and his own psychological journey, his experience of working with people through psychological distress and transformation, and a longstanding interest in neuroscience, philosophy and emerging technology, he brings those perspectives to his fiction.

A British future with international questions

The novel takes readers into London and Glasgow in 2046. Flood-adapted streets, immense new structures and altered ways of moving through a city coexist with familiar differences in security, wealth and opportunity. Those places are lived environments, where invention affects the journey, the view, the body and the relationships a person can afford to sustain.

For UK readers, the future grows out of recognisable cities and the histories they preserve or conceal. For US readers, the questions travel easily: who controls an emerging technology, what happens when care becomes an industry, and how much of another person's life can one ever understand?

Scientific mystery, intimacy and perception

Kathy Adey's investigation draws her towards shared consciousness and technologies outside the boundaries of authorised research. As her perception changes, the scientific uncertainty becomes personal. Understanding someone else might bring her closer to them; it might also make her less certain where her own experience ends.

The reading promise is a near-future psychological thriller with room for romance, sensual experience, architecture and emotional consequence. It is for readers who want ideas to matter to the people carrying them.

Start with The Girl Who Knew My Mind

Explore the novel if your next read needs both a mystery and a question that stays with you: how much of your mind is your own?

Read The Girl Who Knew My Mind on Kindle — Amazon UK · Buy the paperback — Amazon UK