Miami writer
English professor
Autonomous Entity
I write stories ranging from crime to sci-fi to horror to whatever else keeps me up at night.
I also teach writing, make music as Autonomous Entity, and publish essays about race, tech, and culture.
Where I Post
New stuff here:
Read my latest on Medium
Fiction (lots of sci fi), essays, and social commentary.
Updated multiple times a week.
Follow me on Instagram
Writing updates, music clips, random Miami life.
Listen to Autonomous Entity
New single: “Right Time”
Buy Riders in Disguise
My debut 1980’s Miami crime novel from Jitney Books.
(Part of a forthcoming trilogy)
Start Here
If you’re new to my work, some good places to start:
Fiction
- Paper Chains: A Black Family Story (Part 1: 1864)
A black family fights for land, home and dignity across five generations - The Rapture (Part 1)
When a Miami deacon vanishes mid-sermon believers call it the rapture—but a data nerd and an FBI agent see something else in the sky - Headlights in the Rearview
A dark desert highway at night. Two headlights in a rearview. - Drift
When Earth’s microbes crash land on Europa
Essays &
Creative Nonfiction
- The Hive Sounds Like ChatGPT
Pluribus feels like a story about the current state of the internet - Updates: A Century of Headlines
Headlines teach us a lot. In retrospect. - Let Me Play the Damn Story
Video games aren’t boot camp - The Year I Chased the Writer Dream in New York and What It Cost Me
A year in New York broke the fantasy I’d built since childhood, teaching me some things about myself
Books & Future Projects
Riders in Disguise
Crime novel · Jitney Books
Set in Miami during the Cocaine Cowboy era, Riders in Disguise follows four characters—a Liberty City middle-schooler, a Pedro Pan survivor pulled into trafficking, a photographer-turned-journalist, and a homicide detective—through one of the city’s bloodiest decades. The first book in a planned trilogy about how Miami remade itself throughout the 1980’s.
Coming Soon: Book of Aces
A sweeping sci-fi epic about Ace Campbell, a Black physics prodigy from Miami who can see the mechanics of the world around him and spends his life trying to figure out the secrets of quantum gravity. From school hallways and busted Hondas to secret labs and the edge of a collapsing world, Ace keeps gambling his future to save the people he loves, until the line between human and machine starts to break.
Part family saga, part societal-collapse thriller, Book of Aces is about genius, grief, and what it costs to cultivate a new kind of mind.
Patrick Anderson Jr. | Autonomous Entity 