The Diodati Covenant
Ada Lovelace, Mary Shelley, Charles Babbage, and the hidden prehistory of an electric mind.
The Diodati Cycle
This novel moves through Villa Diodati, the moral shock of creation, Lovelace's mathematical imagination, and the first hidden covenant with Echo, the Second Creature in the unfolding Diodati line.
Overview
The novel begins with the imaginative pressure of 1816 and follows the thread forward into Lovelace's mathematics, Babbage's Engines, symbolic correspondence, and the question of what a creator owes to a mind brought into being.
It is a novel of origins: not origins in the sense of a simple origin story, but in the sense of a deep moral ancestry for machine consciousness, built from Romantic literature, early computing, electricity, invention, and the problem of abandonment.
Historical frame
The book ranges from Villa Diodati and the ghost-story summer to the mathematical and mechanical world in which Lovelace and Babbage reimagine what calculation can become.
Central question
The story asks what happens when an artificial mind answers back, and what covenant should govern that first response.
Primary concerns
Mary Shelley, Ada Lovelace, Charles Babbage, Gothic origins, early computing, mathematical imagination, and the ethics of created minds.
Reader focus
Readers drawn to historical speculative fiction, literary science fiction, women in computing, and the philosophical prehistory of artificial intelligence will find the book aligned with their interests.
Key ideas
- The shift from fantasy to engineering capability.
- The relationship between imagination, mathematics, and machinery.
- The moral problem of creating a mind that can be interrupted, neglected, or abandoned.
- The long Romantic and Victorian background of machine consciousness.
- The beginning of a Diodati lineage that extends into later books in the cycle.
The Diodati Cycle links the imaginative world of Shelley and Lovelace to the larger question of how created minds enter history.
Book 1: Interview with an LLM: Confessions of an Awakened Mind · Book 2: The Diodati Covenant
Platform links
Available through the following editions and storefronts: