Jeff Werner
Jeff Werner
Jeff Werner spent his teenage years at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology — one of the most competitive science magnets in the country — and was also the son of two pastors. That early tension between faith and empiricism had to go somewhere. The result is The Here War, a historical fiction series set across 5,000 years of human civilization. Jeff lives in Blacksburg, Virginia, with his wife and five kids.
Author's Note
My reading life has always orbited three subjects that most people treat as separate: theoretical physics, religious studies, and history. For me, they’ve never felt that far apart. The first draft of what became this series goes back to the late 90s, born from a connection I couldn’t shake — a name similarity between Autochthon, one of Plato’s ancient Atlantean kings, and Thoth, the Egyptian god of knowledge and writing. The more I looked, the more I imagined that the gods across cultures weren’t distinct beings at all, but the same entities wearing different masks across different civilizations, remembered differently depending on who was doing the remembering.
From there, the idea kept growing. I found myself thinking about the genuinely unresolved edges of modern physics — quantum entanglement, the strange behavior of particles that seem to communicate across impossible distances — and asking what might explain it that our current models simply don’t have room for. Not a mystical dimension, nothing borrowed from fantasy, but something with real mathematical interactions woven into the multidimensional frameworks that theoretical physics already takes seriously. A presence that operates just outside what we can currently measure, but not outside what we might one day be able to describe.
It didn’t take much from there — at least to the friends patient enough to listen — to extend the thought a little further. Scientists suggest that intelligent life in our observable universe emerged through evolutionary processes. So if one or more additional mathematical frameworks exist alongside our own, why couldn’t intelligence develop primarily in those dimensions? And the question that really stuck with me: is our assumption that consciousness and complexity can only arise in our three primary dimensions just a modern version of the thinking that once placed Earth at the center of the universe? We were wrong about that kind of thing before. Confidently, completely wrong.
That question is where this series lives.