Stephen Southey — Author of The Variable

From the ruins of a perfect world, a new evolution begins.

The Variable is a prestige hard sci-fi dystopian trilogy exploring what happens when a society built on genetic sameness is confronted with the return of human diversity.

The Variable Trilogy

The Variable

Book I: The Infection

Available on Amazon

A compliance analyst descends a shaft into a forgotten vault and discovers the woman who has been living alone with 10,412 frozen embryos for twenty-two years. Together, they build a virus that will reintroduce genetic diversity to a city of 8.4 million identical people. The cost of the cure is everything they have.

The Variable

Book II: The Difference

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The Standard made them identical. The difference made them human. As the first diverse children are born in 211 years, the city fractures. A family flees west carrying one hundred embryos. A Bureau analyst follows. The distance between sameness and humanity is 847 kilometres.

Cover TBA

The Variable

Book III: The Restoration

In Development

Sixteen years later. The daughter walks east to find the father the Bureau took. 847 kilometres in the opposite direction. The same road. A different generation. The word the Bureau put in his mouth was optimal. The word he finds on his own is something else entirely.

The World of The Variable

Year 211 of Equilibrium. Humanity has been genetically standardised for over two centuries. Every citizen stands 6'2", bronze-skinned, symmetrical, muted in temperament. The city of 8.4 million people lives in regulated silence — 22 decibels, even lighting, climate controlled. Words like beautiful, ugly, and unique have been purged from the language. There is nothing to envy when everyone is the same.

She is the most —

Forty-three metres below the city, a Genesis Archive holds the last record of what humans used to look like — 10,412 frozen embryos representing the full spectrum of human diversity. One woman has been maintaining them alone for twenty-two years. One man finds her. What they build together will change 8.4 million lives. What it costs them is the question the trilogy refuses to answer simply.

Children of Men meets Gattaca. Atmospheric. Psychologically dense. Sensory. A story about the distance between sameness and humanity, told at the pace the story demands.

About the Author

His work exploits the vulnerabilities in rigid, optimized control: not of systems, but of the human spirit within them.

Stephen Southey is a novelist and software architect whose work is shaped by a life of shifting horizons. Born in Melbourne, Australia, he entered the IT industry at twenty-one during the foundational digital shifts of the 1990s. At thirty, he migrated to the United States, spending over a decade in Colorado Springs before relocating to Hawaii.

It was during the 2020 lockdowns, a period of profound systemic isolation, that the seeds for The Variable were sown. Now based in Northern Arizona, Southey draws on two decades of software engineering and global migration to craft hard sci-fi that feels hauntingly authentic.

He is currently writing Book III of the trilogy.