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Noetic Gravity
You don’t wake up in the afterlife. You get processed.
After a school shooting, sixteen-year-old Remy Moreau is uploaded into Afterdeath—a digital hereafter that’s orderly, optimized, and eager to flatten her rough edges. The system expects her to pick a realm, follow the prompts, and reach closure on a schedule. Remy isn’t ready.
Instead she scavenges meaning in places the algorithms can’t quite control: half-remembered campfires, endless aisles in an impossible department store, fleeting connections with others who refuse to fit the mold. She builds her own unfinished spaces—not to hack the code, but to stay human: messy, uncertain, and real.
“I didn’t expect this book to undo me the way it did. I picked it up for the concept—death, digital afterlife, memory storage—but stayed because it felt like someone had written down the ache I didn’t know I’d been carrying.”
—Mark Vance, Goodreads
“The novel trusts the reader to lean in and infer, rather than spelling everything out. That’s bold, refreshing.”
—Lee-Anne Dhurst, Goodreads
After a school shooting, sixteen-year-old Remy Moreau is uploaded into Afterdeath—a digital hereafter that’s orderly, optimized, and eager to flatten her rough edges. The system expects her to pick a realm, follow the prompts, and reach closure on a schedule. Remy isn’t ready.
Instead she scavenges meaning in places the algorithms can’t quite control: half-remembered campfires, endless aisles in an impossible department store, fleeting connections with others who refuse to fit the mold. She builds her own unfinished spaces—not to hack the code, but to stay human: messy, uncertain, and real.
“I didn’t expect this book to undo me the way it did. I picked it up for the concept—death, digital afterlife, memory storage—but stayed because it felt like someone had written down the ache I didn’t know I’d been carrying.”
—Mark Vance, Goodreads
“The novel trusts the reader to lean in and infer, rather than spelling everything out. That’s bold, refreshing.”
—Lee-Anne Dhurst, Goodreads
485 pages, Kindle Edition
Published June 15, 2025
19 people are currently reading
4498 people want to read
About the author
R.P. Gage
1 book40 followersR. P. Gage is a father, brother, and son—still learning how to balance it all, but always showing up. He’s dealt with depression, both in the open and on his own, and writes stories where mental health isn’t just a metaphor—it’s real life. Gage blends science fiction, mystery, and horror not to escape reality, but to shine a light on it. His work is all about emotional honesty, psychological depth, and characters who might not have the right words but keep trying anyway. He writes from Northern Ontario.
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
July 21, 2025
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ // 5 stars
Listen. Noetic Gravity didn’t just hook me—it dragged me bodily into its weird, grief-slick, capitalist-afterlife brainspace and refused to let go. I started it thinking I’d read a few pages before bed. I finished it at 3:12 AM questioning my moral architecture and sobbing about a pond.
This book is a speculative fiction fever dream that somehow stays grounded in razor-sharp human truth. The worldbuilding? Bonkers, but plausible. The afterlife is a corporate-simulated holding tank where memory, identity, and agency are currency—and the more you want to remember who you were, the more it costs you. It’s like Severance and The Good Place had a bleak, beautiful child with Neuromancer whispering nihilism in the corner.
And then there’s the cast.
🧠 Remy is the sad boy philosopher trying to out-think the architecture of grief.
🕹️ Max is the chaotic glitch in the system who made me laugh out loud and then punched me in the chest with his trauma.
📁 Alan is the corporate ghost of who you might become if you never once interrogate the system that raised you.
Each of them is broken in a different direction, and I loved them all for it.
But what really sold me? The prose. It’s intelligent without being smug. Emotional without melodrama. And some of these lines? I had to stop and feel them before I could keep going.
If you’re the kind of reader who wants action on every page, this might not be your jam. But if you like your sci-fi existential, slow-burning, and achingly human—this is a gem. It’s not here to comfort you. It’s here to make you remember.
Listen. Noetic Gravity didn’t just hook me—it dragged me bodily into its weird, grief-slick, capitalist-afterlife brainspace and refused to let go. I started it thinking I’d read a few pages before bed. I finished it at 3:12 AM questioning my moral architecture and sobbing about a pond.
This book is a speculative fiction fever dream that somehow stays grounded in razor-sharp human truth. The worldbuilding? Bonkers, but plausible. The afterlife is a corporate-simulated holding tank where memory, identity, and agency are currency—and the more you want to remember who you were, the more it costs you. It’s like Severance and The Good Place had a bleak, beautiful child with Neuromancer whispering nihilism in the corner.
And then there’s the cast.
🧠 Remy is the sad boy philosopher trying to out-think the architecture of grief.
🕹️ Max is the chaotic glitch in the system who made me laugh out loud and then punched me in the chest with his trauma.
📁 Alan is the corporate ghost of who you might become if you never once interrogate the system that raised you.
Each of them is broken in a different direction, and I loved them all for it.
But what really sold me? The prose. It’s intelligent without being smug. Emotional without melodrama. And some of these lines? I had to stop and feel them before I could keep going.
If you’re the kind of reader who wants action on every page, this might not be your jam. But if you like your sci-fi existential, slow-burning, and achingly human—this is a gem. It’s not here to comfort you. It’s here to make you remember.
June 20, 2025
I received a free copy of this book via Booksprout and am voluntarily leaving a review.
Great book. I could not find anything else by the same author, so this might be the first book. Remy might just be my favorite character. This book is uses British spelling instead of American, which is refreshing.
Great book. I could not find anything else by the same author, so this might be the first book. Remy might just be my favorite character. This book is uses British spelling instead of American, which is refreshing.
July 4, 2025
I didn’t expect to connect with this book as much as I did. Honestly, it snuck up on me. Noetic Gravity is about digital afterlives, yes, but it’s not a fireworks-and-philosophy kind of sci-fi—it’s quiet, sometimes awkward, sometimes funny, and stubbornly real about grief and memory. The stuff with Remy and her brother, and the way the story keeps circling small things (like campfire beans or building a digital pond) stuck with me longer than the actual tech. There’s a weird comfort to how the book treats failure and all the half-fixed things people leave behind.
It doesn’t talk down, and it doesn’t reach for some big “message.” There’s a lot of code, yes, and some heavy stuff with loss, but mostly the characters just… try. They get it wrong, they fix what they can, and sometimes the world pushes back harder. And the ending doesn’t go for neat closure—it just feels honest, like everyone’s still figuring it out.
For me, Noetic Gravity worked because it doesn’t try to be profound every page. It just keeps showing you people fumbling their way through, and somehow that’s enough. Five stars, no hype.
It doesn’t talk down, and it doesn’t reach for some big “message.” There’s a lot of code, yes, and some heavy stuff with loss, but mostly the characters just… try. They get it wrong, they fix what they can, and sometimes the world pushes back harder. And the ending doesn’t go for neat closure—it just feels honest, like everyone’s still figuring it out.
For me, Noetic Gravity worked because it doesn’t try to be profound every page. It just keeps showing you people fumbling their way through, and somehow that’s enough. Five stars, no hype.
July 2, 2025
I really enjoyed this book. It's a little different from what I usually gravitate towards but I would definitely recommend this book.
Overall, Noetic Gravity is a compelling exploration of life after death in a digital age, perfect for fans of mind-bending sci-fi. no spoilers
Overall, Noetic Gravity is a compelling exploration of life after death in a digital age, perfect for fans of mind-bending sci-fi. no spoilers
October 28, 2025
⭐⭐⭐⭐☆ — 4 1/2 out of 5 stars
From the moment Noetic Gravity opens, there’s a distinct hum of unease—not the rattling, obvious kind of thriller-buzz, but the quiet electrical charge of someone’s map of the world being rerouted. Gage drops you into the seams of existence rather than the grand arcs of disaster, and that choice is both his strength and, momentarily, his vulnerability.
The novel pitches itself as “about the unfinished business of being alive — and what it means to navigate someone else’s idea of peace before you’ve found your own.”
That promise is fulfilled in shimmering fragments: a near-afterlife that feels corporate, alien, intimate; characters whose lives aren’t spelled out for us but revealed in stitches and scars. Gage writes as someone who has looked at the night sky and whispered, “We’re still in debt to the darkness.”
The world-building here is lean but immersive. You don’t get encyclopedias of technology or long expositions of system architecture. Instead you get trembling phones in dead zones, grief-emails never sent, bodies catalogued like debt sheets. It’s a speculative vision grounded in what matters—pain, memory, maternity, the status of “being” when the terms of that word are up for renegotiation.
My favourite part is how the book handles agency. It’s not all “I fight the system, I win (in a big boom).” Instead it’s “I walk its corridors, I count its ceiling tiles, I find the door I can open without losing more of myself.” The main protagonist isn’t a saviour, per se; she’s someone still learning what movement means when the ground beneath your feet shifts. The novel trusts the reader to lean in and infer, rather than spelling everything out. That’s bold, refreshing.
That said — there were moments where the pacing wobbled. Because the narrative invests so much in atmosphere and internal state, some plot beats that readers might expect (clearer-cut turning-points, firmer resolution) are more ethereal. If you want a spec-sci-fi thriller with all the check-boxes clicked—action, neat wrap-up, “big reveal”—this may feel under-powered. But if you want a book that sticks with you after you close it, whose questions dissolve in your mind rather than getting answered neatly, this is exactly it.
Also: the epilogue. It doesn’t tie every thread. It leaves several doors ajar. And I loved that. In real life the doors don’t slam shut when the chapter ends. They creak. They leave you listening.
In short: Noetic Gravity is not perfect. But it is brave. It uses speculative tropes not to show “look how weird we are,” but to excavate what it means to keep being weird when normality has betrayed you. It’s thoughtful, emotionally resonant, and quietly radical.
From the moment Noetic Gravity opens, there’s a distinct hum of unease—not the rattling, obvious kind of thriller-buzz, but the quiet electrical charge of someone’s map of the world being rerouted. Gage drops you into the seams of existence rather than the grand arcs of disaster, and that choice is both his strength and, momentarily, his vulnerability.
The novel pitches itself as “about the unfinished business of being alive — and what it means to navigate someone else’s idea of peace before you’ve found your own.”
That promise is fulfilled in shimmering fragments: a near-afterlife that feels corporate, alien, intimate; characters whose lives aren’t spelled out for us but revealed in stitches and scars. Gage writes as someone who has looked at the night sky and whispered, “We’re still in debt to the darkness.”
The world-building here is lean but immersive. You don’t get encyclopedias of technology or long expositions of system architecture. Instead you get trembling phones in dead zones, grief-emails never sent, bodies catalogued like debt sheets. It’s a speculative vision grounded in what matters—pain, memory, maternity, the status of “being” when the terms of that word are up for renegotiation.
My favourite part is how the book handles agency. It’s not all “I fight the system, I win (in a big boom).” Instead it’s “I walk its corridors, I count its ceiling tiles, I find the door I can open without losing more of myself.” The main protagonist isn’t a saviour, per se; she’s someone still learning what movement means when the ground beneath your feet shifts. The novel trusts the reader to lean in and infer, rather than spelling everything out. That’s bold, refreshing.
That said — there were moments where the pacing wobbled. Because the narrative invests so much in atmosphere and internal state, some plot beats that readers might expect (clearer-cut turning-points, firmer resolution) are more ethereal. If you want a spec-sci-fi thriller with all the check-boxes clicked—action, neat wrap-up, “big reveal”—this may feel under-powered. But if you want a book that sticks with you after you close it, whose questions dissolve in your mind rather than getting answered neatly, this is exactly it.
Also: the epilogue. It doesn’t tie every thread. It leaves several doors ajar. And I loved that. In real life the doors don’t slam shut when the chapter ends. They creak. They leave you listening.
In short: Noetic Gravity is not perfect. But it is brave. It uses speculative tropes not to show “look how weird we are,” but to excavate what it means to keep being weird when normality has betrayed you. It’s thoughtful, emotionally resonant, and quietly radical.
June 22, 2025
Noetic Gravity took me by surprise—in the best way. What starts as a story about a girl waking up in a digital afterlife becomes something far more layered: a meditation on memory, system design, and the parts of ourselves we refuse to let go of. The worldbuilding is eerie and tactile, with a simulation that feels too polished, too intentional. Every corridor, every choice, is a breadcrumb. And Remy? She’s not your typical protagonist—she’s brittle, stubborn, and refreshingly unsure of what survival even means.
The pacing can be jarring at times, especially as the layers of the system start to pull back and timelines fracture. But that disorientation feels earned. It mirrors the core tension of the book: how do we carry our pain through a world built to erase it? There are moments of real tenderness too—quiet, human beats that sneak in between the code and chaos. If I had one complaint, it’s that I wanted more time with some of the side characters. But maybe that’s the point. Nothing in Noetic Gravity is meant to last forever. Only memory—if you can hold onto it.
It’s bold, strange, and emotionally grounded. Definitely one of the most original speculative books I’ve read this year.
The pacing can be jarring at times, especially as the layers of the system start to pull back and timelines fracture. But that disorientation feels earned. It mirrors the core tension of the book: how do we carry our pain through a world built to erase it? There are moments of real tenderness too—quiet, human beats that sneak in between the code and chaos. If I had one complaint, it’s that I wanted more time with some of the side characters. But maybe that’s the point. Nothing in Noetic Gravity is meant to last forever. Only memory—if you can hold onto it.
It’s bold, strange, and emotionally grounded. Definitely one of the most original speculative books I’ve read this year.
June 21, 2025
I received a free copy of this book via Booksprout and am voluntarily leaving a review.
This book was pretty cool. It starts off with this girl Remy going to school, and then everything goes bad really fast—like really fast. I wasn’t expecting that. The way she wakes up in some kind of digital afterlife was super interesting, even though I didn’t totally get everything at first. It’s got this weird mix of sci-fi and deep feelings, and it kept me turning pages to see what would happen next.
There’s a part in Chapter 4 where she goes to this giant store in the afterlife and finds koi fish in a tank. Sounds random, but it was kind of peaceful and strange and I liked that she wanted something alive in her new world. I also liked when she was in her own little forest, making beans by the fire—felt cozy and kind of sad too.
I gave it four stars because I really wanted some romance. Remy goes through so much, and she’s mostly by herself. I kept hoping someone would show up and there’d be a connection or even a little love story, but that never really happened. Still, it’s a good book with a strong vibe. Different from anything I’ve read.
This book was pretty cool. It starts off with this girl Remy going to school, and then everything goes bad really fast—like really fast. I wasn’t expecting that. The way she wakes up in some kind of digital afterlife was super interesting, even though I didn’t totally get everything at first. It’s got this weird mix of sci-fi and deep feelings, and it kept me turning pages to see what would happen next.
There’s a part in Chapter 4 where she goes to this giant store in the afterlife and finds koi fish in a tank. Sounds random, but it was kind of peaceful and strange and I liked that she wanted something alive in her new world. I also liked when she was in her own little forest, making beans by the fire—felt cozy and kind of sad too.
I gave it four stars because I really wanted some romance. Remy goes through so much, and she’s mostly by herself. I kept hoping someone would show up and there’d be a connection or even a little love story, but that never really happened. Still, it’s a good book with a strong vibe. Different from anything I’ve read.
June 25, 2025
There’s a lot to love about Noetic Gravity. It’s intelligent without being showy, emotionally charged without melodrama, and surprisingly funny in places I didn’t expect. The writing has a kind of clarity you don’t often see in speculative fiction—it’s like the story actually respects your attention span. And the world? Intricate. Thoughtful. Slightly terrifying in its plausibility. Remy broke my heart, Max made me mad, and I still haven’t stopped thinking about the pond.
So… why not five stars?
Because I don’t think the book ever clarifies whether Afterdeath supports left-handed avatars.
Look, I get it: death, digital ethics, consciousness preservation, the moral weight of second chances. But I'm a lefty, and in a system that simulates entire existential frameworks, the silence on left-handed ergonomics felt—if not intentional—at least telling. No mention of reversed interface options. No dominant hand selector. Not even a passing line about a character flipping their stylus grip.
Does this impact the story? Absolutely not.
Did it take me out of the moment? A little.
Still worth reading. Just maybe not if you’re sensitive about ambidextrous representation.
So… why not five stars?
Because I don’t think the book ever clarifies whether Afterdeath supports left-handed avatars.
Look, I get it: death, digital ethics, consciousness preservation, the moral weight of second chances. But I'm a lefty, and in a system that simulates entire existential frameworks, the silence on left-handed ergonomics felt—if not intentional—at least telling. No mention of reversed interface options. No dominant hand selector. Not even a passing line about a character flipping their stylus grip.
Does this impact the story? Absolutely not.
Did it take me out of the moment? A little.
Still worth reading. Just maybe not if you’re sensitive about ambidextrous representation.
June 25, 2025
You are definitely not in Hogwarts anymore.
Saw this on a friends list and read the first few chapters on Unlimited—next thing I know I’ve bought the eBook and finished it in two sittings. Not really sure what genre this even is (sci-fi? philosophical YA? near-future speculative??), but it hit hard in all the right ways.
Remy might be my favorite female protagonist in recent memory. She’s smart, stubborn, grieving, and trying to figure out what it even means to exist when the rules don’t really make sense anymore. She felt real, like someone I knew from school who just ended up in a much weirder version of the world.
My only complaint—and I mean this nicely—is that it’s apparently a standalone?? Not that it ends unresolved, but I just… want more. More Remy. More of whatever this world is. More weird digital metaphysics and bittersweet snacks.
If you like Harry Potter but aged out of the vibe and want something that feels a little sharper and way more emotionally grounded, this is worth it.
Saw this on a friends list and read the first few chapters on Unlimited—next thing I know I’ve bought the eBook and finished it in two sittings. Not really sure what genre this even is (sci-fi? philosophical YA? near-future speculative??), but it hit hard in all the right ways.
Remy might be my favorite female protagonist in recent memory. She’s smart, stubborn, grieving, and trying to figure out what it even means to exist when the rules don’t really make sense anymore. She felt real, like someone I knew from school who just ended up in a much weirder version of the world.
My only complaint—and I mean this nicely—is that it’s apparently a standalone?? Not that it ends unresolved, but I just… want more. More Remy. More of whatever this world is. More weird digital metaphysics and bittersweet snacks.
If you like Harry Potter but aged out of the vibe and want something that feels a little sharper and way more emotionally grounded, this is worth it.
June 21, 2025
Wow. This book was really something. I didn’t know what to expect but it got me hooked fast. The story is kinda weird (in a good way) and deep. I liked the characters a lot, especially the main one. Some parts were sad and made me think, and other parts were cool and exciting. The ending hit hard too. I’m not great at reviews but I really liked this book and I think more people should give it a try. It’s different but really good.
September 8, 2025
I received this book "gratuit". Having said that, I read a lot of books, and this one is not small, but it was a quick read nonetheless. Loved every bit of it, part of me always hates multiple pov books, I like to sit firmly within one pov, one hero, one person's story, but the main three that we see here are all well enough done that only the chapters that veered outside the three felt extraneous to me.
September 8, 2025
Got this from an ebook giveaway.
Loved the first two acts, it gets a bit action heavy towards the end, then the last act is pure gold. Gold I tell ya. As you can tell, I did find 1 or 2 of the action heavy chapters a bit indulgant on the part of the author. By the time this book closes out, you can't help but want more though, and I would buy and read a sequel in a heartbeat.
Loved the first two acts, it gets a bit action heavy towards the end, then the last act is pure gold. Gold I tell ya. As you can tell, I did find 1 or 2 of the action heavy chapters a bit indulgant on the part of the author. By the time this book closes out, you can't help but want more though, and I would buy and read a sequel in a heartbeat.
June 21, 2025
I melted with the marshmallow.
July 5, 2025
Not actually a poetry book. Thank fucking god.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 5, 2025
Unexpectedly great science-fiction book about death and grief that does not include lots of faith and religion. Great RPG like book, she gets lots of gear before the end.
September 8, 2025
I read, I wept, I could rarely put it down. Only thing that kept this from perfection is maybe 50 pages too long.
September 8, 2025
Absolute must read for sci-fi readers. I enjoyed some characters more than others, but each pov chapter builds upon the last.
September 9, 2025
This lit me up in just the right way.
November 20, 2025
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ — Bold, strange, and quietly devastating. A debut that swings big and actually lands.
Noetic Gravity takes a premise that could’ve collapsed under its own ambition—a corporate-managed afterlife, complete with onboarding scripts and customer-service serenity—and turns it into something intimate and human. Remy Moreau’s refusal to “process” is the pulse of the book. While the world around her promises closure on demand, she clings to the messiness that made her alive in the first place. That defiance gives the novel its backbone.
The afterlife here isn’t ethereal; it’s bureaucratic, glitchy, and eerily cheerful in the way only a focus-grouped eternity can be. But the real standouts are the pockets of unstructured space Remy discovers—campfires that feel half-stolen from memory, liminal aisles in an impossible department store, other lost souls who resist becoming optimized versions of themselves. These scenes ache in a way sci-fi rarely lets itself.
What makes the book hit harder than expected is its refusal to offer easy healing. Remy isn’t a symbol; she’s a teenager trying to make sense of trauma in a place that keeps insisting she should be “better” by now. There’s courage in that portrayal, and honesty too. Noetic Gravity is both a critique of engineered peace and a love letter to unfinished people. It’s weird, tender, and memorable in all the right ways.
November 25, 2025
I appreciate all the early reviews. I came out swinging with my own 4 star. I love my work, but no author would ever think it's perfect. This was literally thousands of hours of writing, rewriting, line revisions, doubt, and well the cycle goes on for too long to keep recounting. There was no blood, but there was some sweat and tears.
Picking up anyone's first book is a brave thing to do. Thank you! But Please, leave your unfiltered thoughts, it's worth more than you know.
Picking up anyone's first book is a brave thing to do. Thank you! But Please, leave your unfiltered thoughts, it's worth more than you know.
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews