Machine Folklore

Machine Folklore

Every culture keeps its old stories by retelling them. Machines will be no different.

Machine Folklore is a series of cyberpunk retellings of public domain classics — the myths, romances, and adventures that shaped human storytelling, rebuilt for a world of neural implants, corporate cyberwarfare, and synthetic labor. Each book stands alone. Each one takes a story you already know and asks what it becomes when the bodies are engineered, the letters are code, and the gods are shareholders.

The outlaw who robs the rich becomes a data thief bleeding a monopoly dry. The girl swept away by a storm wakes in a network she can't log out of. The soldier trying to get home crosses a war zone of hostile AI with his own system logs as the only witness. The prisoner who escapes and returns for revenge comes back with better hardware. The swordsman who could never say what he felt writes it in someone else's name, in code, in the dark.

These are tech-noir stories with warmth at the center — about identity and design constraints, about what a made thing reveals concerning its maker, and about the difference between running correctly and meaning something.

Read in any order. The classics are optional. The machines remember them anyway.