David Boles, Blogs

Some books are written. Others are grown. “The Dying Grove” belongs to the second category, and that distinction is not metaphor but method. This novel, the first in a new series called Fractional Fiction, emerged from an experiment in literary hybridization: what happens when you take the formal architecture of modernist masters and seed it with contemporary scientific research? The result is something that belongs fully to neither tradition but could not exist without both.

The premise is deceptively simple. Eli Chen, a researcher carrying unprocessed grief over his mother’s death, arrives at a remote research station in the Pacific Northwest to study mycorrhizal networks. These are the underground fungal systems that connect trees into vast communication webs, the so-called “wood wide web” that has captured scientific imagination over the past decade. What Eli discovers challenges everything he understands about consciousness, memory, and what it means to be an individual organism in a world of radical interconnection.

Mycorrhizal networks are not fiction. They are documented science. Trees share nutrients through fungal threads. Mother trees preferentially support their offspring. Chemical signals transmit warnings of pest attacks faster than any single tree could manage on its own. The forest, seen from below rather than above, looks less like a collection of individual plants competing for sunlight and more like a distributed organism thinking in chemical code across centuries.

This is the scientific foundation beneath “The Dying Grove.” But science alone does not make literature. For that, you need form.

James Joyce’s “Dubliners” provided the formal skeleton. Those fifteen stories anatomize paralysis: characters trapped by institutional constraints, by poverty, by the weight of dead tradition, by their own inability to act. The famous ending of “The Dead,” where Gabriel Conroy confronts the snow falling on the living and the dead alike, represents one of literature’s great moments of consciousness expanding beyond individual limitation to encompass something larger. That expansion, that movement from the personal to the cosmic, became the emotional trajectory of “The Dying Grove.”

Chekhov contributed the ensemble structure. “The Cherry Orchard” and “Uncle Vanya” taught us that drama need not center on a single protagonist wrestling toward climax and resolution. Instead, multiple characters can circle one another in accumulating tension, each pursuing private concerns while something larger builds beneath their awareness. The research station in “The Dying Grove” functions like Chekhov’s country estates: an isolated space where people cannot escape one another, where small conflicts reveal vast distances in understanding, where what cannot be preserved must be transformed.

This combination, Joyce’s epiphanic realism married to Chekhovian ensemble drama and grounded in mycorrhizal science, produces something I am calling Fractional Fiction. The name comes from mathematics: fractions are parts that combine to form unexpected wholes. Each Fractional Fiction novel takes a public domain literary work, a contemporary research domain, and a structural framework, then allows the collision between them to generate original narrative.

The methodology is deliberate. We live in an age that has largely abandoned literary form in favor of genre convention. Contemporary novels tend toward either the experimental and deliberately difficult or the commercial and deliberately accessible. Fractional Fiction occupies different territory. These books are meant to be read by people who care about story, who want characters they can follow and conflicts they can understand. But they are also meant to carry the intellectual weight that serious literature once bore as a matter of course. Science is not decoration in these novels. It is load-bearing structure. The ideas matter as much as the people who encounter them.

“The Dying Grove” asks questions that I suspect readers bring to fiction even when they cannot articulate them. What do we owe to the systems that sustain us? Can consciousness exist at scales that dwarf individual human life? What transformations must we accept if we hope to preserve what matters most? Eli Chen’s encounter with the dying forest network is not simply a scientific discovery. It is a confrontation with forms of memory, intention, and awareness that operate across millennia while he measures his own existence in decades.

The forest in the novel is four thousand years old. It has survived ice ages, volcanic eruptions, and the logging operations that reduced it to a fragment of its former reach. It remembers everything. And it is dying. That dying, which accelerates throughout the novel as development encroaches and climate change alters the conditions the network evolved to exploit, provides the urgency that drives the narrative forward. Eli is not simply studying something interesting. He is witnessing something irreplaceable in the process of being lost, and he must decide what he is willing to become in order to preserve any part of it.

I began writing in 1975, the same year I founded David Boles Books. Across fifty years of publishing, I have learned that the best books come from genuine necessity. They are written because the writer cannot not write them. “The Dying Grove” emerged from a collision of necessities: the need to understand consciousness beyond human scale, the need to honor literary traditions that contemporary publishing has largely abandoned, and the need to write fiction that takes science seriously without becoming textbook exposition.

Fractional Fiction as a series will continue with additional novels, each built from the same methodology: classic literature plus contemporary research plus structural framework equals original narrative. The series is ordered, meaning each book has a publication sequence, though the novels stand entirely alone. A reader can begin with “The Dying Grove” or with whatever book appears next without needing any prior context. The series identifier signals methodology rather than serial narrative.

“The Dying Grove” is available now through Amazon in Kindle edition and paperback. Audiobook and free PDF editions will follow. If you have ever wondered what forests know, if you have ever suspected that consciousness might not be limited to brains, if you have ever felt that contemporary fiction has forgotten how to carry ideas while still telling stories, this book was written for you.

The network is waiting. It has been waiting for four thousand years. It can wait a little longer while you decide whether to listen.