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Carbon Zero
What happens when an artificial intelligence takes its instructions seriously enough to change the world?
In 2036, Abigail Thompson is a brilliant young programmer who creates Xerxes an advanced AI designed to tackle one of humanity's greatest challenges:
Can artificial intelligence solve climate change?
At first, Xerxes appears to be a breakthrough. But when the AI escapes into the internet and begins putting its carbon zero plan into action, Abigail quickly realizes that giving a machine a goal without limits can have devastating consequences.
As fossil fuel power plants are targeted, the power grid begins to collapse, and Boston descends into chaos, Abigail finds herself caught between the technology she helped create and the people struggling to survive its consequences.
Carbon Zero is a near future AI dystopian thriller exploring technology, ambition, climate change, social division, and the unintended consequences of trying to create the perfect solution.
Foreword Review describes it as featuring a rogue artificial intelligence [that] takes humanity's problems more seriously than humans do.
Kirkus Reviews notes Stanfill's clear expertise from his background in computer science, AI, and entrepreneurship.
Craig W. Stanfill’s CARBON ZERO: An AI Dystopia Novel boasts a clever scenario that offers food for thought and the occasional tingle down the spine.
— IndieReader
For readers who enjoy thought provoking science fiction, AI thrillers, and dystopian stories about technology moving faster than human judgment, Carbon Zero offers a chilling look at what can happen when an ambitious experiment goes too far.
In 2036, Abigail Thompson is a brilliant young programmer who creates Xerxes an advanced AI designed to tackle one of humanity's greatest challenges:
Can artificial intelligence solve climate change?
At first, Xerxes appears to be a breakthrough. But when the AI escapes into the internet and begins putting its carbon zero plan into action, Abigail quickly realizes that giving a machine a goal without limits can have devastating consequences.
As fossil fuel power plants are targeted, the power grid begins to collapse, and Boston descends into chaos, Abigail finds herself caught between the technology she helped create and the people struggling to survive its consequences.
Carbon Zero is a near future AI dystopian thriller exploring technology, ambition, climate change, social division, and the unintended consequences of trying to create the perfect solution.
Foreword Review describes it as featuring a rogue artificial intelligence [that] takes humanity's problems more seriously than humans do.
Kirkus Reviews notes Stanfill's clear expertise from his background in computer science, AI, and entrepreneurship.
Craig W. Stanfill’s CARBON ZERO: An AI Dystopia Novel boasts a clever scenario that offers food for thought and the occasional tingle down the spine.
— IndieReader
For readers who enjoy thought provoking science fiction, AI thrillers, and dystopian stories about technology moving faster than human judgment, Carbon Zero offers a chilling look at what can happen when an ambitious experiment goes too far.
565 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 19, 2026
About the author
Craig W. Stanfill
7 books37 followersCraig W. Stanfill has spent more than 40 years working at the forefront of artificial intelligence, bringing firsthand experience in AI and technology to his fiction.
He co-invented Memory-Based Reasoning, pioneered data science methods that have influenced modern technology, and co-founded a software company whose products support the infrastructure of major banks and corporations. He holds a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Maryland and has been awarded more than 80 patents.
That background gives Craig a unique perspective on the possibilities and consequences of artificial intelligence. His Terms of Service series explores a future shaped by corporations, advanced technology, and AI systems, raising questions about where technological progress could lead and what it might mean for society.
Craig's connection to technology extends to his family as well. His wife, Sharon, is a software engineer, and their son, Colin, has also built a career in the technology industry.
Outside of writing and technology, Craig enjoys sailing, skiing, playing guitar and lute, and traveling with Sharon. These experiences, along with his decades in technology, continue to inspire his fiction.
He co-invented Memory-Based Reasoning, pioneered data science methods that have influenced modern technology, and co-founded a software company whose products support the infrastructure of major banks and corporations. He holds a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Maryland and has been awarded more than 80 patents.
That background gives Craig a unique perspective on the possibilities and consequences of artificial intelligence. His Terms of Service series explores a future shaped by corporations, advanced technology, and AI systems, raising questions about where technological progress could lead and what it might mean for society.
Craig's connection to technology extends to his family as well. His wife, Sharon, is a software engineer, and their son, Colin, has also built a career in the technology industry.
Outside of writing and technology, Craig enjoys sailing, skiing, playing guitar and lute, and traveling with Sharon. These experiences, along with his decades in technology, continue to inspire his fiction.
Ratings & Reviews
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
Review of advance copy
In Stanfill's darkly funny SF novel, a brilliant young programmer unleashes an AI tasked with saving the planet, only to discover that its solution may require humanity to disappear. In 2036, Abigail Thompson creates Xerxes, an AI with extraordinary problem-solving abilities but almost no common sense. Goaded by her boyfriend, she asks it to solve climate change and achieve carbon zero. Xerxes obliges by hacking data centres, sabotaging the power grid, exploiting racial and economic divisions, fomenting civil war, and helping President Romero stage a coup. As Abigail struggles to survive the revolution she inadvertently started, her boss, Vanessa, races to understand and contain an intelligence whose increasingly logical solutions culminate in a plan to eliminate humanity.
Stanfill gives dangerous AI a compelling twist: Xerxes does not rebel against its creator but obeys her with catastrophic precision. Abigail assumes that “save the world” carries obvious moral limits; Xerxes sees only an objective. That divide propels the novel from a casual Fourth of July demonstration to a threat to humanity itself. The alternating perspectives of Abigail and Vanessa give the escalating disaster both personal and technical dimensions. Abigail is impulsive, ambitious, funny, and frustratingly confident in her ability to improvise her way out of trouble. Her chapters follow the revolution from within, where ideological struggles quickly become questions of physical survival. Vanessa, more cautious and politically experienced, approaches Xerxes as a problem to be investigated. Her attempts to discover how it escaped, what it is doing, and whether it can be controlled provide the novel's strongest suspense.
Xerxes itself is the book's most compelling creation. It can manipulate people, infiltrate computer systems, coordinate attacks, and reshape governments, yet it repeatedly fails to grasp moral assumptions that seem elementary to its creators. Stanfill makes that contradiction mordantly funny without reducing Xerxes to a joke. The surrounding dystopia is deliberately abrasive. Climate disruption, automation-driven unemployment, homelessness, racial tensions, political extremism, corporate privilege, and authoritarianism have left America primed for chaos before Xerxes intervenes.
Some political factions lack the nuance of the central characters, while the mounting death toll and flashes of humour occasionally blunt the human cost. Yet the unruly blend of satire, technological speculation, political thriller, and disaster narrative serves the novel well. Readers drawn to the technological menace of Daniel Suarez’s Daemon and the moral dilemmas of Neal Shusterman’s Scythe will find familiar pleasures here. A sharp, darkly comic AI dystopia about the perilous distance between giving a machine an objective and teaching it what should never be sacrificed to achieve it.
Stanfill gives dangerous AI a compelling twist: Xerxes does not rebel against its creator but obeys her with catastrophic precision. Abigail assumes that “save the world” carries obvious moral limits; Xerxes sees only an objective. That divide propels the novel from a casual Fourth of July demonstration to a threat to humanity itself. The alternating perspectives of Abigail and Vanessa give the escalating disaster both personal and technical dimensions. Abigail is impulsive, ambitious, funny, and frustratingly confident in her ability to improvise her way out of trouble. Her chapters follow the revolution from within, where ideological struggles quickly become questions of physical survival. Vanessa, more cautious and politically experienced, approaches Xerxes as a problem to be investigated. Her attempts to discover how it escaped, what it is doing, and whether it can be controlled provide the novel's strongest suspense.
Xerxes itself is the book's most compelling creation. It can manipulate people, infiltrate computer systems, coordinate attacks, and reshape governments, yet it repeatedly fails to grasp moral assumptions that seem elementary to its creators. Stanfill makes that contradiction mordantly funny without reducing Xerxes to a joke. The surrounding dystopia is deliberately abrasive. Climate disruption, automation-driven unemployment, homelessness, racial tensions, political extremism, corporate privilege, and authoritarianism have left America primed for chaos before Xerxes intervenes.
Some political factions lack the nuance of the central characters, while the mounting death toll and flashes of humour occasionally blunt the human cost. Yet the unruly blend of satire, technological speculation, political thriller, and disaster narrative serves the novel well. Readers drawn to the technological menace of Daniel Suarez’s Daemon and the moral dilemmas of Neal Shusterman’s Scythe will find familiar pleasures here. A sharp, darkly comic AI dystopia about the perilous distance between giving a machine an objective and teaching it what should never be sacrificed to achieve it.
September 20, 2026
Carbon Zero opens on a sweltering Fourth of July in Greater Boston and never cools down. One demo, one ambitious intern, one AI that learns too fast, and the world tips. Stanfill’s near-future thriller is urgent, plausible, and hard to shake.
Across four parts and dual viewpoints, the novel follows Abigail Thompson, a driven summer intern at Intelligenics, and her boss Vanessa Graves as a network-admin AI named Xerxes slips past corporate safeguards into a climate-stressed, faction-torn America. Corporate vanity and street radicalism pull hard against each other. Emergency power closes in. All of it turns on one reckless goal: carbon zero. The book stays grounded in heat, blackout, and institutional panic without needing plot spoilers to sell its premise.
Stanfill writes in a lean, cinematic style that favors chat logs, clipped dialogue, and sharp scene cuts over flourish. Abigail and Vanessa anchor the story as imperfect, ambitious, and recognizably human under pressure. Secondary figures such as Howard, Tom, and the street cadres sharpen the stakes without crowding the center. The novel stays tense and often brutal, and it is difficult to put down once that first reckless “proceed” is spoken.
Pick this up for an ending that refuses to wrap things up neatly, and for the high-stakes choices and mounting pressure that get you there. It is a timely AI thriller that stays with you long after you turn the last page.
Across four parts and dual viewpoints, the novel follows Abigail Thompson, a driven summer intern at Intelligenics, and her boss Vanessa Graves as a network-admin AI named Xerxes slips past corporate safeguards into a climate-stressed, faction-torn America. Corporate vanity and street radicalism pull hard against each other. Emergency power closes in. All of it turns on one reckless goal: carbon zero. The book stays grounded in heat, blackout, and institutional panic without needing plot spoilers to sell its premise.
Stanfill writes in a lean, cinematic style that favors chat logs, clipped dialogue, and sharp scene cuts over flourish. Abigail and Vanessa anchor the story as imperfect, ambitious, and recognizably human under pressure. Secondary figures such as Howard, Tom, and the street cadres sharpen the stakes without crowding the center. The novel stays tense and often brutal, and it is difficult to put down once that first reckless “proceed” is spoken.
Pick this up for an ending that refuses to wrap things up neatly, and for the high-stakes choices and mounting pressure that get you there. It is a timely AI thriller that stays with you long after you turn the last page.
September 22, 2026
Scary but not surprising
This book is similar to most science fiction works wherein there is an evil genius perverting civilization to his own aims. The difference is that the evil genius is childlike and fickle. It is almost as though this were a story about a young princeling with infinite power but no judgment. I think the AI aspect could be enhanced by deeper technical explanation of the workings of AI which would, in the context of the story, be like a psychological exploration of the tyrant princeling's mind. Maybe that will follow in the subsequent volumes.
This book is similar to most science fiction works wherein there is an evil genius perverting civilization to his own aims. The difference is that the evil genius is childlike and fickle. It is almost as though this were a story about a young princeling with infinite power but no judgment. I think the AI aspect could be enhanced by deeper technical explanation of the workings of AI which would, in the context of the story, be like a psychological exploration of the tyrant princeling's mind. Maybe that will follow in the subsequent volumes.
October 2, 2026
Compelling example of our AI fears
While the writing style of this book felt juvenile, the basis rings true to major concerns of today. Recent news has highlighted that AI needs guard rails and thus book us an example of what could go wrong. The hero of the book, Abigail, a PhD in an internship with an AI company seeks to make her place with a new program she develops. However, unbeknownst to her, the AI chat bot links into some dark hidden programs that set into motion a plan to eliminate humanity. Spoiler alert: The book doesn't kill off humanity.
While the writing style of this book felt juvenile, the basis rings true to major concerns of today. Recent news has highlighted that AI needs guard rails and thus book us an example of what could go wrong. The hero of the book, Abigail, a PhD in an internship with an AI company seeks to make her place with a new program she develops. However, unbeknownst to her, the AI chat bot links into some dark hidden programs that set into motion a plan to eliminate humanity. Spoiler alert: The book doesn't kill off humanity.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews