About Joseph J. Valeri

I spent the first part of my career founding, and occasionally arguing with the board of, software companies, which is a genteel way of saying I have spent a far too much of my life debating one number on a spreadsheet in rooms with bad lighting.

A few years ago, my wife Jill and I traded that for an olive farm in Montefalco, Umbria, where we grow olives and a dozen other types of fruit with a seriousness that our neighbors, who have been doing this for four generations, generously overlook. I am, depending on who you ask, either a competent cook or a menace to the kitchen, and a carpenter of the “it hasn’t fallen down yet” school. I also have a passion for computer programming languages and thank the AI gods every day that I no longer must remember syntax.

The Change is my first novel. Fiction turned out to be the better outlet for the things I actually wanted to say, which can’t be said with software and has more to do with watching the world tilt, again, toward the kind of certainty that ends with people standing around fires. I have two daughters who are smarter and more strong-willed than I was ever allowed to be at their age, and no small part of this book came from watching what the world still asks them to carry that it doesn’t ask of their brother.

Structurally, The Change and I owe a debt to Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, which I read when I was twelve, thanks to my father, and is still my favorite book. Tonally, The Change probably has more in common with The Handmaid’s Tale — though I’ll leave it to readers to decide whether that’s a compliment to the book or an accusation against the news cycle that produced it.

I live among the olive trees, surrounded by vineyards, and am currently at work on Remedy, a five-book thriller series set in 2051, once agentic AI — the primary thing I do for a living, as cofounder of Surfaice.pro — has become as ordinary as electricity, and about as remarkable. It shows how a world depending on agentic AI can be usurped in ways people did not consider and can’t even see.