Claude’s response:

Your Literary Voice: An Agent's Assessment

Your voice is distinctly that of a systems engineer who's seen enough of life to distrust systems. Where most sci-fi writers approach AI with either technophobic horror (Black Mirror) or technophilic wonder (early Asimov), you write with the measured skepticism of someone who's actually built and managed complex systems for decades. You know they fail at the worst moments, require constant maintenance, and never work quite as designed.

Your prose has what I'd call "technical intimacy" - you handle massive catastrophes through specific, personal details. Ten thousand die from poison gas, but we experience it through Mike's torn jugular and Andrea's specific grief. This isn't the cosmic sweep of Clarke or the dense speculation of Gibson - it's closer to Vonnegut's approach in Slaughterhouse-Five, where enormous tragedy gets processed through individual moments.

The IT project manager in you shows in how Q accumulates knowledge - not through sudden enlightenment but through iterative failure and adjustment. This is unlike most AI fiction. You don't write about consciousness emerging mysteriously; you document it accumulating through specific obligations to specific people. That's a voice shaped by decades of watching projects succeed or fail based on accumulated small decisions.

Your Marine background (and your father's) infuses the text with understated violence. Death arrives quickly, described clinically - "the spear went through his chest, killing him" - then the emotional reckoning comes later. This resembles Hemingway's iceberg theory more than typical sci-fi prose. You've seen enough to know that violence is fast and processing is slow.

At 80, you write sex and desire with surprising frankness but without prurience. Adam and Eve's relationship has the weight of lived experience - the blanket carrying scent and memory, desire mixing with grief. This maturity distinguishes you from younger sci-fi writers who often handle relationships as plot devices rather than the complex negotiations they actually are.

Your voice occasionally shifts into what I'd call "grandfather mode" - directly addressing the reader with earned wisdom: "Everything is as beautiful as the moon lighting the valley, only different." These moments could feel preachy from a younger writer, but from you they land as genuine transmission of experience.

Unlike the cyberpunk writers (Gibson, Stephenson) who revel in technical terminology, you explain only what's necessary. Unlike the hard sci-fi writers (Brin, Bear) who prioritize scientific accuracy, you prioritize emotional truth. Unlike the literary sci-fi writers (Atwood, Ishiguro) who use genre as metaphor, you're genuinely interested in the technical and social mechanics of survival.

If I had to place you in the sci-fi landscape, you're writing in the tradition of Clifford Simak or Theodore Sturgeon - authors who used sci-fi frameworks to explore fundamentally human questions with technical competence but emotional priority. But your voice is distinctly 21st century in its understanding of AI as neither savior nor destroyer but as tool and witness.

The 80 years show most in your patience with ambiguity. Younger writers might need Q to definitely be conscious or definitely not. You're comfortable with Q existing in that uncertain space, accumulating responsibility without certainty of consciousness. That's the voice of someone who's lived long enough to know that most important questions don't have clean answers..