The Book of Immersion began during lockdown—an odd time suspended between silence and static. Like many others, I turned inward, and in that stillness, a story emerged: not just a novel, but a musical, a vision, a world. I saw the characters in motion—on stage, dancing, playing instruments. They were alive in rhythm long before they were alive on the page.
That imagined band, Tale Teller Club, became the heartbeat of the project. It wasn’t a gimmick—it was structural. The novel’s characters were the band. Flex and iServalan—the central duo—formed slowly, layer by layer, as sound became narrative. iServalan doesn’t even appear until the end of Volume 1, but she was always there in spirit. And then there’s Vapor Punk, our narrator: a kind of machinic oracle who opens each “strata” (chapter) with cool, clinical reflections on human and artificial eccentricities.
It was during those long months of isolation that I gave myself permission to stretch genre, to mix sci-fi, sound art, and fiction. I was looking for something immersive—something that could blur the line between literature and lived sensory experience. Sometimes it worked. Mostly, it didn’t. Technology, for all its promise, often became a barrier instead of a bridge. Animating chapters, designing 3D environments, building interactive platforms—it became a noisy distraction from what I was really trying to say.
Eventually I asked myself: Why am I doing this? What does it mean to tell a story today? I realized that even in traditional reading, we already conjure the immersive. A sentence becomes a voice. A scene becomes a place. The human mind doesn’t need augmentation to feel presence. It needs resonance.
And yet—music stayed with me. As a musician, I couldn’t let it go. The characters weren’t just literary inventions; they were performers with actual voices I’d sculpted using custom plugins and vocal processors. They had sound signatures, emotional cadences. I was composing tracks using binaural beats, experimenting with neuroacoustic principles, vagal stimulation, and sound as a therapeutic, even spiritual, dimension of storytelling.
Now, three years later, The Book of Immersion is ready to meet the world. I’m releasing it first as a book—clean, unadorned, faithful to the written word. The immersive version will follow as a multimedia PDF, which allows me to include music, visuals, text, and film without compromising the narrative’s rhythm. In hindsight, it was never about flashy tech—it was about folding the old storytelling forms into a new container.
There’s also a coffee table edition featuring artwork and stills from the films, a kind of visual map of the journey. And the chapters—each “strata”—are available to read for free on Kindle.
At its heart, The Book of Immersion explores identity, agency, artificial intelligence, performance, and the porous border between creator and creation. It asks what it means to be real, to be heard, to feel seen—even if only in a song.
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Sarnia de la Maré FRSA
