Fabricants
The Manifold Series Book Two
Battles over the custody of meaning center the thoughtful science fiction novel Fabricants, about the intricacies and inextricability of consciousness and meaning.
Scott A. Young’s pensive science fiction novel Fabricants is about memory, consent, and what counts as a life.
Aboard a ship crewed by humans, clones, and robotic beings, a constructed or “fabricant” mind pieces together its overlapping recollections in this procedural novel. Ethical dilemmas are embedded into its routine tasks, such that lab notes become evidence, maintenance logs become testimonies, and a ship’s chain of command becomes a moral theater. In a recurring motif, records are treated as inheritances too: Diagnostic readouts and notebooks take on the weight of wills and confessions, so technical artifacts carry narrative authority as much as human testimonies.
The plot unfolds through slippages of memory and the selective release of records, resulting in suspense. Much progresses because of psychological imbalances rather than pure action. The storytelling favors the incremental revelation of motivations over surprises for their own sake: Scenes reconstruct procedures or replay diagnostic feeds, supplying new facts that change how characters must act. The structure follows that of evidentiary logic; each recovered file or decrypted passage redefines responsibility and forces command decisions in light of fresh context.
A central formal device is the use of fragmented perspectives to model patchwork identities. Rather than presenting memory fragments as mere ornaments, the narrative lets those fragments unsettle testimonies and reshape alliances. Sections that juxtapose hardware diagrams with interior monologue show how cognition depends on layered media: Nerve-implant reports and testimonies read as the same kind of record. When a fabricant reflects that “what counts as proof is what someone will take to the archive,” the line reframes the novel’s conflicts as battles over the custody of meaning.
The book’s characterizations are rich, too, balancing procedural detail with moral complexity. Command decisions cannot be split into neat categories of right and wrong; instead, officers weigh their competing obligations to their missions, crews, and emergent claims from sentient constructs against one another. The text stages each choice without offering a single moral verdict. That restraint strengthens the book as a whole, as it resists prescriptive ethics and lets consequences accumulate. Supporting players perform crucial work as moral mirrors; technicians and minor officers exemplify the institutional habits by which policy becomes practice.
The prose practices a specific kind of sensory realism. Metal, sealant, and diagnostic tones register as constant material presences, and the book uses those textures to dramatize the stakes in repair scenes and diagnostic reads. At moments, the language becomes terse and forensic, covering schedules, pump outputs, and coroner notes, and the narration shifts from being evocative to documentary, signaling a change in the psychological framework. Such shifts function as methods as the novel moves from empathy-building scenes to coverage of files and then back again into decision moments. Here, judgment is an enacted process rather than a summary one.
The book maintains taut narrative momentum throughout, keeping a firm grasp on its philosophical depth. Ethical puzzles remain open, but they still feel consequential because the story ties them into embodied harm, institutional momentum, and personal loyalty. When a character reads a lab log and finds evidence not of malice but of compromise, the discovery reframes culpability; the ending carries moral ambiguity instead of proffering tidy closure.
Fabricants is an identity-driven science fiction novel about the complexity of sentience.
Reviewed by
John M. Murray
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
