Chimera, the Hypatia Chronicle

Chimera: The Hypatia Chronicle is literary science fiction set in a post-Carbon War near future, narrated from inside a coma by a man who understands the world through miniaturization.

Luchs is a diorama builder. He lies in an induced coma while a totalitarian regime attempts to extract the location of a fossil from his unconscious mind - and he realises he can resist them in the only way available to him: by building. Each memory becomes a miniature world whose lighting, scale, and placement he controls. Every diorama is encryption. The Grey Men's machines pull his thoughts as fast as he constructs them. He builds faster.

In a fractured Pacific Northwest, where the Carbon Wars have reduced nine billion people to six, the Precisians - a religious nationalist movement enforced by the politely brutal Grey Men - control government, media, and military, and are closing in on science. Their battleground is the Institute, and at its heart: a fossil unearthed, a doomed love, a brilliant woman destined to change humanity, and a time-travelling Bot.

A love story, a political fable, and a meditation on what it means to make meaning in a world that is always trying to steal the frame.