Remapping the Human Template: Gods of the New Wilderness Book One

by Dale L. Sproule

Remapping the Human Template is a streamlined, updated version of The Human Template for new readers.
A streamlined & updated version of The Human Template for new readers.
Step into the forest. The future is already growing.
This is not a war between man and machine. This is the fusion of what remains — nature, flesh, code, and myth — into something new. Something sacred. Something dangerous.
The collapse of civilization didn’t just take down governments — it shattered the very beliefs that once gave life meaning. In the shadow of the fall, a new wilderness rises… and within it, the seeds of something divine.
Three hundred years from now, Earth has transformed into a world where the forest fights back; biological AI stirs with ancestral memory; a child named Glory speaks the future in song; and technology is reborn through cruelty, ambition, and forgotten lore.
Inside the last AI on Earth, the revolution is streaming live… and starring Che Guevara.

Genres: Science Fiction, Philosophy

334 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2020

About the author

DALE L. SPROULE
Author of the Gods of the New Wilderness Series:
I'm getting excited! Book Two Crossing The Carnivorous Forest releases July 30.
Book One, Remapping the Human Template is free from all online retailers until book two appears.
Find out more on his author page: https://www.godsofthenewwilderness.com.

In the late 90’s Dale co-published/edited the celebrated journal, TransVersions – Literature of the Fantastic, with Sally McBride.

As D. L. Sproule, Dale has also published two short story collections: Psychedelia Gothique and Psychedelia Noir. He has over 60 published stories and dozens of non-fiction articles for venues ranging from Books in Canada to Rue Morgue.

Check out his blog at https://medium.com/@DLSproule, his author page at https://www.facebook.com/TheHumanTemp... and his personal website at https://dalelsproule.com

Reviews

[Derryl · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s a rare thing to come across a novel that can be described as truly authentic, and rarer still to find one so incredibly well written. Amidst the slush piles of vampiric fan fiction and Game of Thrones imitations 'The Human Template' comes screaming forth with a story that's so unique, I can honestly say I’ve never read anything like it in my entire life.

From the first paragraph, I'm sucked into a psychedelic post-apocalyptic world where a genetically engineered forest with artificial intelligence is fighting for survival against the last remnants of human civilisation. A world where the warring factions includes a band of pro-human trees who celebrate human culture by taking on the personalities of famous historical figures. Living the lives of various celebrities, they wear the avatars and adopt the mannerisms of the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Marilyn Munroe and Che Guevara.

Then there’s the humans. Ruled over by a pseudo-religious cult, they’ve lost all knowledge of modern technology and live in a society no more advanced than the medieval era. The antagonist – the sadistically manipulative Adoris – is not only a guilty pleasure but without doubt one of the most creative villains I’ve encountered. She’s so well written that, despite her being a psychopath, I found myself being lured to her side like one of her victims. It's quite unsettling how her power to seduce transcends the page. A credit to the skill of the author.

The concept for this novel is so mind-bendingly brilliant that it’s almost too easy to miss how expertly crafted the writing is. The worldbuilding is mesmerising, the dialogue witty and engaging. My only disappointment was arriving at the last page.

Eagerly awaiting the sequel!

[Mundy Reimer · Rating 3 out of 5]

TL;DR - ❤️🌲🧠🤖🐰🔪🍷🍆🍑

Initial Impressions

So as I often enjoy doing especially at the start of a new year, I was perusing my TBR list re-ordering things that I would like to study and books that I want to read. And after meticulously re-ordering things for the umpteenth time and very carefully reading reviews while immediately darting my eyes away at the first hint of a spoiler, I came across this book. Relatively unknown author, okay check!..I like unearthing potential gems. Let's check Kindle and skim a few pages...Oh wow, it was beta read by Peter frakkin' Watts! He's one of my all-time favorite sci-fi authors (especially in the hard SF subgenre) so that's definitely a strong point in favor of this book. Okay now let's read a few pages in...Yup, yeah I'm hooked :)

So not only did finding out that this book was mainly about trees end up currying favor with my lifetime botanical hobby / inner amateur naturalist, but combined with the fact that my backgrounds are in both neuroscience + computer science with hearty servings of philosophy on the side, then a book whose main premise is about uploading ourselves to this vast biological computer composed of an interwoven network of trees was like totally my jam! And it was only putting a cherry on top that this book covered the same topics that I myself already do research about, such as theories of artificial life + ecologies of nested selves constantly forking and coalescing. It was also perfect timing that I happened to recently finish going through this other textbook and writing a series of articles on algorithmically generating plant structures. So yeah, this is a major disclaimer that the author already scored some easy win points from me thematically-wise and that my review might be a bit biased going forward. Regardless, if any of these fields or topics interest you, then I'd highly encourage you to check out this book already!

Strengths

I know this isn't for everyone, but something I really like when it comes to science fiction are the little compressed nuggets of detail that just casually get dropped throughout a novel without much explanation. You definitely see this dialed up to the max when it comes to an author like Peter Watts (combined with his sheer word-smithing poetic skill). And I think to a degree these casual drops of tasty morsels are one of the strengths this author also possesses. Examples such as .tct files representing tactile data, the culture of Wikipedia editors regarding difficult to source information, the mention of infection by organisms like nematodes, borer beetles, and parasitic fig wasps, feeling emotions "in their pith", or the "procedural wisdom" taking up most of the space in a sparrow's brain, etc, all really help flesh out a world of detail and reward those of us who enjoy mulling over a story and building it out further within our minds with the ever fruitful and magical power of What if..?

And if esoteric bits of knowledge don't bring you a high as they do me, maybe humor might be more your cup of tea. There are points in this novel where the gravity of the situation was often hilariously juxtaposed against mentions of whimsically random items like a business card and even a tuba, lol. Details are also littered all over the place when it comes to random pop-cultural references that span the historical gamut from Norma Jeane Mortenson (Marilyn Monroe), The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, Che Guevara, Pan's Labyrinth(!), and even to the niche Silent Hill horror video game franchise! Although I often enjoy these brief windows into the author's personal cultural diet, I'm also making a note that I see this as an easy *shotgun-like* writing technique to score points from a broad range of readers if they happen to share a common niche interest (like I really enjoy the aesthetics of Pan's Labyrinth for example).

With the minor strengths out of the way, I think one of the bigger selling points of this novel obviously stems from its thematic core. I realize it's not entirely unique, as I have read somewhat similar nature-based distributed consciousness concepts in older novels such as that of Frank Herbert's Pandora sequence featuring sentient sea kelp, or even the more recent winds of Ventus and the concept of Thalience written about by Karl Schroeder. Regardless, the themes of simulated and distributed consciousness provide quite a fertile bed in birthing thought experiments regarding the essence of humanity. For instance, I can't quite recall where I might have heard of this before, but this author's concept of psyche surfing or constantly embodying new personalities was pretty good, especially when it touched upon the consequences of the nature and fidelity of the Self(s) and any personality(s) disorders that might arise. Casual drops like mammals having no real pain memory but only remember having suffered are great as well.

Furthermore, showing what we as a society value and pour our cultural efforts and heritage into through funny reveals such as "The hills are alive with the sound of inglorious basterds" and other cultural artifacts that preoccupy the slicing, dicing, and remixing done by the tree entities was a great way of exploring our humanity (though it's funny how similar preoccupations of AI entities regarding remixing media are also explored by a few authors like Yoon Ha Lee for example). Anyway, I feel like I would really enjoy having lunch with this author exchanging all sorts of crazy philosophy of mind thought experiments. I would especially like to discuss parts where he could have gone a bit further with the speculation, like including concepts such as relativistic clock speeds and inertial frames of reference, levels of the computational complexity of algorithms, or even physically building out imagery like the dissipation of waste heat that should come off a tree from all that computation. Additionally, playing with grammar a bit more when it comes to the non-individuated trees would be welcome, like confusions with plurals or tenses, or even switching up of the orders of SVO, SOV, or no subject at all, etc. And how come there are so few scientists and engineer trees and like zero mathematician trees, haha!? I would expect those innate human values of curiosity to crop up, especially with the whole 'beings created in the image of their maker' and all that jazz.

Now with all that said about the author's exploration of the themes of Identity, I think the main strength this author possesses is how well he writes small scenes, especially when it came to emotionally salient, explicit, or sensory details. The author nails every single one of these! 👏 Whether it was how the trees physically felt when they experienced the taste of blood or the sheer catharsis of emotionally salient events like our main characters' sexual experiences, all of this was written in a way that drew me in and had me fully immersed. The author also paints violent and sexual scenes really well (especially in our main antagonist's case), both as mutually exclusive and joint events (which is also a warning for those of you who can't stand this stuff, and a silent wink-a-dink-kink to those of us who do enjoy *reading about* this stuff 😉). Overall, this is incredibly well done and lent the piece a realistic vibe that complements well the more speculative sci-fi elements that compose the novel.

Weaknesses

DUNDUNDUN! Okay, so I feel a bit bad about having to write this part, especially as I felt somewhat special that an author *gasp* has followed me here on Goodreads. Yes me, a total rando on the internet! Anyways, just in case he reads this I just want to let him know that I'm trying to write this portion as constructively and candid as I can, especially since I sincerely enjoy people further improving their own crafts when I know they have so much potential talent that I can already see.

So first things first, we definitely have to address the atrocious editing! OMG. I don't know if this was only a problem with the kindle version I had, and I admit I'm terribly ignorant of the behind the scenes economics and hurdles a writer must go through to get something like this published, but there was just WAY too many simple spelling and grammatical errors strewn all over the place. Did the author not have a competent editor!? Was the author short of funds or had his back to the wall with a deadline? Was this self-published and DIY? Anyway, I actually went ahead and documented each and every single page I saw an error, just in case the author reads this and somehow finds things easy to fix (I mean in our digital age, things can't be that hard, right?) So I dunno if this helps, but the OCD part of me just went ahead and did this regardless. The pages with errors in the kindle version are as follows: 21, 52, 53, 59, 60, 61, 116, 121, 154, 164, 171, 194, 207, 209, 221, 231, 273, 281, 290, 302, 310.

Okie dokes, so with that said, the only major criticism I have left is that the ending was way too abrupt. It didn't match the rhythm, pacing, and cadence the author established. Why spend the time explaining other tree factions like the gamer trees or the trees that just wanted to be good upstanding trees if they weren't further touched upon? Why so much time spent laying the foundations with the main character's early love interest or their seemingly significant fraught relationship with their mother when that was barely built upon? Not to mention the sudden ending with nothing even minor being resolved with the main antagonist burning down forests or unleashing viruses. Even the main character's later romantic interest fell to an abrupt and somewhat anticlimactic demise. I'd highly recommend checking out this Brandon Sanderson creative writing lecture featuring Mary Kowal. She explains quite well how a story (even a 2-part one like this novel) should unfold and then pack itself back up similar to one of those Matryoshka Russian nested dolls. In other words, she explains that each little scene should open up and resolve itself like the tags of an HTML document. You can definitely play with this structure and stray from strict conventions, but in general, I think there's something in the human psyche that craves patterned resolutions. I myself suffer from this in my writing (which I think is worsened whenever I read the multiply-nested clauses of German philosophers), but I think if you are a fictional author you have to pay special attention to this for the sake of the reader's emotionally invested purposes, very similar to how a musical artist pays attention to the resolution of certain notes or chords to build their composition, or a DJ paying attention to the vibe of their dance floor.

Conclusion

Overall, I really liked this book. The latter two major weaknesses which could have easily been remedied with tighter editing dropped this book down to a 3 for me, but that is bumped a tad up to barely a 4 due to its thematic strengths and strong individual scene writing. The book ranged from wackadoodle silly to philosophical, violent, sexual, and dark, which showcased well an author who can paint with such a wide repertoire of human experiences. Great job! 👏

* Oh, and if I ever write a sci-fi book, I'll have to keep in mind to ask a few favorite authors of mine to beta read, haha.

[Dale]

After The Human Template came out in 2020, many of the reviews and much of the feedback dwelt on the same sticking point - the opening was a slog, but once you made it through that, it's a wonderful book.
My reaction was exclaim, "but it should be a wonderful book from the start!" It took me two years to rewrite the opening in the same style and voice that had won over most of the readers of the first version.
Remapping the Human Template launched in May 2024. The book now starts on page one. While I can't expect early readers to REread it, I'm delighted that new readers are finding it more...of whatever it is! LOL. They seem to like it. Which is great - because book two launches in summer 2025 and I think it keeps getting better.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow!! Let me start off by saying... wow! I read a fair bit and learned long ago that there is nothing ever really new in the way of plots or of characters. With the advent of sf&f one can no longer claim the same of settings. But I digress...

Why "wow"? Well, every once in a very, very long while I run across a book with a truly original take on a meme that has already been well-mined. To run across such a book which is also well-written is exceedingly rare. The Human Template is such a book. Shockingly - at least to my old-fashioned take on the book world - is self published.

You can read a precis above but let me tell you what got my juices going. First, the notion of uploading (or perhaps downloading is a better word to use here) human consciousness to a network of tree root systems is, well... its just super cool. It's also unexpected, daring, fascinating, and intriguing. To add to the delight, the notion of a plant based, networked consciousness is not as unbelievable as you may imagine. For about twenty or so years now botanists have been exploring plant communication via - yeah, you guessed it - in plant root systems.

The Human Template begins with an apocalypse, continues with the "lives" and escapades of the consciousnesses within the root system, concluding with a "return" to the "real" world.

And that's all I'm going to say... anything else would be spoiler.

[Eric Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

A big, bold, ambitious novel by Dale L. Sproule who (not content with combining the end of the world as we know it – the vast majority of the human race is wiped out in 2049 – with the notion of a supercomputer called the BioGrid holding almost the sum total of human knowledge) explores ideas of humanity, post-humanity, and much, much more in a sprawling VR extravaganza. When a solar flare annihilates the planet, scientist Veejay Naidu downloads his son’s consciousness into a huge biological computer lodged in trees and their root systems. Sproule makes this zany concept wonderfully believable with his firm grasp of concepts, graphic imagery, and some fine writing. (Page 45 is a masterclass of description). Raine Naidu awakes to consciousness in the BiogGrid 322 years later to find himself inhabiting a very strange world where accreted consciousnesses occupy avatars of Che Guevara, Marilyn Monroe, SF’s own Cory Doctorow, to name but a few – and where an ideological war is ongoing between trees embodying various philosophies. And Part Two of the novel gets even stranger… There’s a lot to like in The Human Template: strong world-building, sly humour, and some thought-provoking science and philosophy.

[Drew Frohmann · Rating 5 out of 5]

When starting a new sci-fi novel, I’ve come to expect some form of compromise: a mind-expanding story chock full of brilliant ideas, but wrapped in uninspiring prose.

Or a beautifully written story that, upon reflection, I’ve read some version of before.

The very best sci-fi does both: excites your brain as much as it enthralls.

But as we all know, an experience like that is few and far between.

Ender’s Game. Some Philip K. Dick. A lot of Arthur C. Clarke. John Wyndham. Some of Alan Moore. R. Scott Bakker’s Second Apocalypse series.

Damn if this wasn’t one of those novels!

From the title, I fully expected the insane concepts.

But I have to say, from the first chapter, I got sucked into this story. As the world expanded and the ideas grew, the characters actually got more interesting, the conflicts more engaging, the what-the-hell-is-he-gonna-do-NOW???s more engrossing.

(And, as it turns out, the insane concepts were way more original than I expected.)

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel. I’m very much looking forward to the rest of this story.

[Alice Winn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Glory’s fragmented way of speaking gave me chills. She’s a haunting symbol of digital overload and lost innocence. I’ve never read a character quite like her, and I won’t forget her anytime soon.

[Debby Stephaine · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book completely blew my mind. The concept of a biologically rooted AI surviving humanity’s collapse is brilliant, and the execution is just as striking. The Carnivorous Forest is one of the most original and haunting sci-fi settings I’ve read in years. Raine, Glory, and Adoris are deeply layered characters, and the ethical questions the story raises stuck with me long after I turned the last page.

[Sally · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an inventive, quirky book this is! I can usually tell what's around the corner in a book or show, but not with this one. Really fun, at times shockingly brutal and at other times whimsical and funny. The cultural references kept me amused and engaged, and I have to say the Human Template features possibly the most evil villain ever. Cruella DeVille, move over! Sexy, fast moving and satisfying - I found it hard to put down.

[Dora Ruyhie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can’t say enough good things. This book restored my faith in science fiction as a genre that still has something to say. Raine is a compelling male protagonist, and the revolution he becomes part of is deeply human, even if the humans are mostly trees.

[Blessing Oladeji · Rating 5 out of 5]

🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

Review for Remapping the Human Template: Gods of the New Wilderness Book One

An absolutely mind-expanding read! Remapping the Human Template is a bold, visionary journey that challenges what it means to be human. The storytelling is rich, the world-building is stunning, and the themes are deeply thought-provoking. I was hooked from the first page and left in awe by the end. A brilliant start to what promises to be a groundbreaking series.

[Rhodes Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every few chapters I had to stop and catch my breath, not because of action, but because of the philosophical weight. This book is a rare find.

[Joan Odigie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This isn’t just another apocalypse. It’s a total reimagining of what life, and intelligence, could look like after the fall of humanity. The motile trees with factions and philosophies of their own? Incredible. The sibling rivalry between Glory and Adoris is emotionally devastating and intellectually fascinating. This book reads like Dune meets Annihilation, absolutely gripping and totally unpredictable.

[Douglas Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sproule creates a unique and astounding vision for a post-apocalyptic world, where much (but not all) of humankind's knowledge has been preserved in the BioGrid, a vast forest of sentient trees, all interconnected by their root system. But the forest, much like humanity, is not a unified group, with some trees wanting to become individual entities with freewill, while others wait only for the emergence of the Operator, the human whom they long to serve. Add a partially reconstructed human into the Grid, and a repressive fascist human colony looking to enslave the forest, and you have a stunningly fresh post-apocalyptic tale.