Vivienne Marchand / The Marchand Report
“If this is humanity’s reckoning, then Ex Inani is its black box—recording every failure, every flash of hope, and every unanswered question. It is not a comfort. It is a challenge.”
In a time when extinction feels more like bureaucracy than destiny, Rodgers’ debut refuses to flinch. The Ark of Humanity: Ex Inani isn’t merely a fictional warning—it’s a mirror, polished by artificial intelligence and framed in philosophical urgency.
DUX, the AI designed to reflect the emotional, ethical, and logical impulses of humanity, is the most unnerving character in the book—not because it lacks empathy, but because it learns it. And the lesson it learns is both beautiful and damning.
This book is not for the faint of faith. It demands your judgment, your doubt, and your willingness to reconsider who deserves salvation when there are not enough seats left in the sky.
Andrew Delaney / The Galactic Shelf
“A compelling premise that sometimes stumbles under its own weight—but still leaves you thinking.”
Tom Rodgers’ first entry in The Ark of Humanity trilogy is ambitious, haunting, and densely packed with political allegory. It asks all the right questions—what is the ethical cost of survival? Can artificial intelligence be a moral compass when human leadership fails?—but doesn’t always trust its characters to answer them without extended philosophical scaffolding.
The central narrative alternates between global-scale crisis and intimate character moments, and when it works, it really works.
Dr. Ira Shaliv / Institute for Ethical Futures, Geneva
“Rodgers doesn’t predict the future—he triangulates it.”
Ex Inani is not a prophecy. It is a simulation: a chillingly plausible convergence of current trajectories in artificial intelligence, global instability, and social polarization.
As a researcher focused on long-horizon risk assessment, I approached this book expecting exaggerated science and cinematic logic. Instead, I found orbital mechanics that check out, an artificial intelligence that evolves within defined constraints, and a crisis response structure modeled on disturbingly familiar institutional fragmentation.
But what lingers most is not the science—it’s the psychology. The notion that diversity isn’t just ethical policy, but existential necessity, is among the more radical and compelling hypotheses I’ve encountered in speculative fiction.
This is not light reading, nor is it escapism. It is a layered narrative disguised as a survival story, and it deserves to be taken seriously.