David Samuel Allen's Blog
June 22, 2026
My debut novel is out!
I started writing this novel back in 2014, in grad school — then let it sit, 75% finished, for over eight years. About two years ago I finally decided it was time to finish it.
I worried the writing wouldn't be the same, that I would have lost whatever momentum I had after so long. But the wait turned out to be a gift: there's a maturity in the ending that a David ten years younger couldn't have written... Which feels oddly fitting, because the book is partly about that very thing. A mathematician discovers a library that holds the book of his own life — every event of his past, and his future — and has to decide what to do with a story that already seems written. Coming back to finish a manuscript my younger self abandoned ended up feeling like an ironic exploration of the novel's own themes.
If free will, determinism, mathematics, art, and lots of coffee drinking sound like your thing, I'd love for you to read it and leave an honest review.
(Bonus: written entirely by a human, as the tech to fake it didn't even exist yet in 2014.)
A Free Will Manifold
I worried the writing wouldn't be the same, that I would have lost whatever momentum I had after so long. But the wait turned out to be a gift: there's a maturity in the ending that a David ten years younger couldn't have written... Which feels oddly fitting, because the book is partly about that very thing. A mathematician discovers a library that holds the book of his own life — every event of his past, and his future — and has to decide what to do with a story that already seems written. Coming back to finish a manuscript my younger self abandoned ended up feeling like an ironic exploration of the novel's own themes.
If free will, determinism, mathematics, art, and lots of coffee drinking sound like your thing, I'd love for you to read it and leave an honest review.
(Bonus: written entirely by a human, as the tech to fake it didn't even exist yet in 2014.)
A Free Will Manifold
