The Man Behind the Sunglasses

For the past year, my author photo has been a black-and-white image of a man in a hat and Ray-Bans, face half-hidden, expression unreadable. It was deliberate. I write about ancient AIs that treat humans as interesting specimens, about commanders who might be losing their grip on reality, about the terrible cost of becoming something more. A little mystery felt on-brand.

But here's the thing about masks: they work both ways. They hide you from the world, and they hide the world from you.

When I started writing science fiction seriously, I wasn't sure anyone would want to read what I had to offer. Cosmic horror. Military space opera where the real enemy isn't the one shooting at you. Stories about consciousness, memory, and the question of whether humanity is an experiment designed to fail. Not exactly beach reads. The sunglasses were armor. If no one could see my eyes, maybe they couldn't see the doubt behind them.

The doubt is still there, honestly. It probably always will be. But something shifted recently.

I've been getting emails. Not many, but enough. Readers who found Station Thirteen unsettling in exactly the way I'd hoped. Someone who read The Shepherd Descends and wanted to talk about judgment, and whether humanity deserves its place among the stars. A book club that invited me to join their discussion. These aren't faceless interactions with a mysterious author photo. They're conversations. And I realized I was showing up to those conversations wearing a disguise.

So here's the new photo. No hat. No sunglasses. Just me, in my backyard, probably thinking about whether an ancient AI would find string lights philosophically interesting.

I still write the same stories. The universe in my books is still vast and ancient and largely indifferent to whether we survive it. Ships still whisper at frequencies that shouldn't carry meaning. Soldiers still discover they're pieces in games older than their species. None of that changes because you can see my face now.

But maybe this is what my own stories have been trying to teach me. The commanders and scientists I write about—the ones who survive, anyway—are the ones who eventually stop hiding. Not from the cosmic horrors outside, but from the smaller, more human horrors within. The fear of not being enough. The fear of being seen and found wanting.

I'm not saying I've conquered those fears. I'm saying I'm done letting them choose my author photo.

If you're reading this, you probably already know what kind of stories I tell. Dark ones. Strange ones. Stories that crawl under your skin and ask uncomfortable questions about what we are and what we're becoming. That hasn't changed. I'm still the same writer who believes the most terrifying thing in the universe might be the discovery that something has been watching us evolve and taking notes.

I'm just doing it with my eyes visible now.

Welcome to the next chapter. I'm glad you're here.

—J.A. Raithe