I have always been interested in how people, societies, and systems influence each other.
My background is in engineering and economics, and I spent more than three decades working in the financial sector. Over time, this shaped the way I look at the world. I tend to think in terms of systems, long-term consequences, and the often hidden connections between human decisions, technology, institutions, and social change.
But professional experience is only one part of the story.
Many things shape the inner world of a person. Perhaps I was fortunate in an unusual way. As a sickly child, I spent a great deal of time alone at home, and the family library became my primary window to the world.
Alongside youth novels and adventure stories, I was already reading authors such as Simone de Beauvoir, Nexø, Bulgakov, and many others long before I was truly mature enough to understand them. At the time, I probably grasped only fragments of what I was reading, but looking back, I am certain those books left a lasting mark on the way I think.
Later, I became increasingly interested in philosophy and science fiction. That world fascinated me completely. It would be difficult to name all the writers who influenced me deeply, because I was curious about almost everything I could find.
I spent much of my free time in bookstores. There were three I visited on weekly basis, constantly searching for new and interesting books. Looking back, it is somewhat strange that I rarely went to libraries. For some reason, I always felt the need to own the books themselves.
After university, everyday professional life gradually pulled me away from intensive reading and pushed me more toward formulating my own thoughts and questions.
These experiences eventually found their way into both my fiction and essays.
My novel Responsio grew out of a long-standing interest in philosophy, natural sciences, topology, and the question of how models of reality can influence not only scientific understanding, but society itself. The second novel I am currently working on explores similar scientific and societal themes through a more personal and human perspective.
I tend to interpret the world through two different forms of writing.
One is fiction, where philosophical, societal, and structural questions are embedded into narrative, characters, and imagined systems. The other is essay writing, where these same ideas can be explored directly, without fictional mediation.
For me, the two approaches are not separate activities, but different ways of interpreting the same underlying questions about civilization, human behavior, technology, and the structures that shape the modern world.
A Personal Note on Writing Fiction
One aspect of my work that often surprises people is that I came to novel writing relatively late.
For many years, stories existed only in my imagination. Early mornings, sleepless nights, and quiet moments regularly produced characters, situations, and entire worlds. Had I developed all of them, I could probably claim to be the author of hundreds of novels. Fortunately for readers, most of them remained exactly what they were: brief thought experiments and unfinished possibilities.
The real challenge was never the lack of ideas. It was finding the courage to begin.
About four years ago, a collection of philosophical, scientific, and societal questions that had accompanied me for years finally reached a point where they demanded a larger form. Drawing on fragments of many earlier ideas, I decided to attempt something I had never done before: write a novel.
I approached the task systematically. I studied the craft, worked with writing and timeline software such as Scrivener and Aeon Timeline, developed character profiles, created a detailed synopsis, and tried to plan the project as thoroughly as possible.
For a long time, nobody around me knew what I was doing. Looking back, that secrecy was probably unnecessary, but at the time I preferred to keep the manuscript entirely to myself until it had taken a recognizable form.
The process turned out to be far more demanding than I had imagined. The synopsis was rewritten several times, many of the original plans changed, and I gradually discovered that writing a novel is fundamentally different from writing an essay. Over time, I found myself relying less on the tools and more on the writing itself. Many of the applications proved helpful during the planning phase, but eventually I returned to a much simpler process. The real work was not managing timelines or character sheets but learning how to follow the story wherever it chose to go.
Interestingly, the project did not begin under the title Responsio. During the early stages of development, my working title was At First There Was Infinity.
Looking back, that title reflected the questions that originally drove the project: topology, cosmology, the nature of reality, and the possibility that what we perceive as separate may ultimately belong to a larger, unified structure.
As the manuscript evolved, however, my attention gradually shifted from the model itself to its human consequences. The story became less about infinity and more about people, relationships, social dynamics, and the ways individuals and societies respond to profound change.
That evolution eventually led to the title Responsio.
An essay follows an argument, a novel follows people.
Perhaps that was the most important lesson of all.