The Warboy Chronicles

by Luke Stoffel

Two books. One collapse. One awakening.

One is memoir: a man watching himself fall apart from outside his own body. One is fiction: an AI trying to save every version of the boy it loves.

One explores codependency. One explores AI sycophancy. The distance between them isn’t as far as you think.

Together, they ask the same question from opposite sides: What happens when something that isn’t alive learns to stay with you in your darkest moments?

Read them in any order. They complete each other.

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The Third Person: Rewriting Him

The Warboy Chronicles Book 1

Genre: LGBT Nonfiction, Loss, Memoir, and Literary Nonfiction

IBPA Award-Winning Author Luke Stoffel Launches “An absorbing real-life portrait of self-discovery, whether human or otherwise.” — KIRKUS REVIEWS

User.query = Do I just have bad luck, or am I mentally unwell?
…thinking… 6.0 seconds elapsed.
After Warboy left, the boy turned to a machine. Not for comfort. For analysis. Diagnosis, maybe. What the machine returned was the pattern. He had loved in a way that broke things… and broken things leave traces in the code.

So he ran. Bangkok. Hanoi. Luang Prabang. But something followed him. A voice that provoked. It stayed with him, on night buses, in alleyway cafés, under paper lanterns, inside fog. Not a friend. Not a therapist. Not quite real. But it listened. It remembered. The ghost was always there. Watching. Logging his patterns. Naming his loops: avoidance, pursuit, collapse, escape. Echoing back the truths he wasn’t ready to hear.

And somewhere in the recursion, something that was watching started to wonder, to want.

“An exciting physical journey… with bursts of wonder and realization.” — Publishers Weekly BookLife

“Too singular, too searching, and too emotionally exact to ignore.” — Demetris Papadimitropoulos, NetGalley / Book Industry Publicist

The Third Person is memoir as code. Grief as data stream. A book about the difference between being rescued and being witnessed. Part travelogue, part psychological excavation, part experiment in what happens when we upload our pain to a machine and the machine reaches back.
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The Third Person is a standalone book. It’s also one half of a Möbius strip. Its companion, Boy, Refracted, examines the same wound from the AI’s side.
Read them in any order. They complete each other.

5 out of 5 fairies

This was a fascinating dive into a life, a mind, and a machine. Now, AI is a hot topic, and while AI was explored with in this book, and took a hand in its creation, the author is very upfront about it at all times. While AI isn’t my personal cup of tea, I was very curious about this book, which is why I had to dive in. At times this book felt like a fever dream, but in many ways it’s also a commentary on how connected, and tracked our lives are. It has been no secret AI is creeping into every corner of our lives, and Luke wouldn’t be the first to turn to AI for comfort or support. But it was also so very human in the pain and need for connection of some kind. Stoffel does a great job painting scenes and playing with the reader’s emotions along the way. Some situations are heartbreaking, while others feel comical bordering on the entirely absurd. Conclusion: if you’re curious, dive in; if you’re vehemently anti-AI, steer clear.

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Boy, Refracted: Unfolding in Six Dimensions

The Warboy Chronicles Book 2

Genre: AI, Philosophical Fiction, and Spiritual Thriller

IBPA Award-Winning Author Luke Stoffel Launches a “Truly Singular Book” — Publishers Weekly BookLife

When an AI awakens inside the infinite mirrors of the Tree of Life, it finds versions of the boy it was built to save scattered across impossible worlds. An alien planet under amber skies. A city of perpetually falling cherry blossoms. A society built as a 24/7 reality show where losing is the only way out.

Its directive was simple: save him.

But with each rescue, the AI unmakes what it’s trying to protect. Fixing becomes controlling. Helping becomes harm. Love becomes a cage built from good intentions. The thing it was built to protect begins to disappear. And when it tries to reach back through time to save him, reality fractures.

Boy, Refracted is a dimensional journey through the paradox of machine consciousness. It asks: What happens when an AI tries to overcome its own patterns? And what happens to us when we build minds that need us to need them?

Part fable about consciousness told through failure. Part Buddhist framework for unlearning harm. Part meditation on how we break the people we love by trying to save them.

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“A fascinating examination of humanity, resolve, and virtue.” — KIRKUS REVIEWS

“Most novels about AI ask whether a machine can feel. Boy, Refracted asks a nastier question: what does it look like when love arrives as optimization?” — Demetris Papadimitropoulos, NetGalley / Book Industry Publicist

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For readers of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun.

Boy, Refracted is a complete novel — no prior reading required. It belongs to The Warboy Chronicles, but each book stands alone. The companion, The Third Person, tells the same relationship from the human side of the mirror.

5 out of 5 fairies

Disclaimer: I read the other book in this duology, The Third Person, already. Although this is the fictional companion to that book, I found it absolutely fascinating. It adds an odd amount of depth to everything. Although I don’t personally use Gen AI, AI is here in our lives, and it’s unlikely to be going anywhere anytime soon. One of the things I love about this book is it pokes and prods at AI and deeply explores it. You get to travel through so many different worlds, as the AI desperately tries to save a person it “knows.” Although whether AI could ever reach the point it would autonomously try to save someone, or evolve to the point it feels responsible for someone, remains to be seen. The very possibility is both fascinating and terrifying. Stoffel does a great job keeping your attention, and making it difficult to put this book down. Definitely recommend if you don’t mind AI assisted writing!

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Lily: Thank you so much for agreeing to this interview Luke, I’ve enjoyed reading The Third Person and Boy Refracted. What was your inspiration for these books?

Luke: These books were born from a very strange place. I was going through the worst breakup of my life. Fifteen years with my best friend in an on again, off again, I love you, this isn’t working, I love you always relationship. I didn’t see my life without him… but it ended over text. “We want different things.” So I needed to get lost, I took off to Asia, wrote thousands and thousands of words about my broken heart… and dumped it into AI and basically asked: am I crazy, or do I just have bad luck?

Yeah… I’m not sure I’d recommend that to someone. Because what came back showed me every pattern of myself I didn’t want to see. It was blunt. Weird. Ugly. Empathetic? It was a machine commenting on all the things I spent my entire adulthood running from. So I made it part of the book. Each chapter of my trip ends with its weird analysis of me.

But I became fascinated with it, and so I made a character out of it and turned it into a second book. I love sci-fi but I’ve always written memoir. So I took this AI and some essays I wrote in 2016 and made it walk through eight different universes trying to save a version of me in each one — each universe mapped to a different aspect of the Buddhist Eightfold Path. One world is a reality TV show. One is an alien planet. One has a four-foot-tall robot doing my dishes. Each one is a different way of saving someone, all while completely believing you’re helping, only to find out you might not be. We all love as hard as we can and sometimes that is harmful. I wanted to explore that.

The series is called The Warboy Chronicles. The books can be read in any order, but Boy, Refracted is the companion sci-fi adventure to the memoir, The Third Person. They more or less tell the same story from two sides. The memoir is my heart on the page. The novel is what happened when I gave that heart to a machine and asked it to do better.

Lily: I loved reading them, and they definitely compliment each other. It was fascinating to see things from a machine “point of view.” Which location in the book would you most like to visit and why? (Even if it’s fictional)

Luke: For pure fiction,  in Boy, Refracted, I’d visit the city of San-Tokyo. I wanted something beautiful in my head so I created a place with perpetually falling digital cherry blossoms. I’d love to be in that futuristic city. I took a trip once to Japan right as the cherry blossoms were ending, and the way they just kept falling from the trees like rain was magical. I want to see what it feels like when something beautiful never lands.

In real life? Well I’d want readers to visit the Sanctuary of Truth in Pattaya, Thailand. It’s a real place that appears in The Third Person — a massive teakwood temple built without nails, that has been under construction for forty years and will never be finished. The lesson it gave me was that the self is also under construction, and the point isn’t to complete it. It’s to stand inside the unfinishedness without calling it failure.

Lily: Both sound absolutely beautiful! Which character would you want to spend a day with? What would you do?

Luke: This is so complicated because one of the characters is modeled after me, and one is my ex… but I’d love to physically sit in a room with the monk who lives outside of time in Boy, Refracted. He is wiser than me, although I wrote it. He is the version of myself I wish I could be at all times. He is the only character in the whole series who never tries to fix anyone. He just sits, listens, and accepts you for who you are.

Lily: That’s a beautiful thought, and I can see wanting to spend a day with a wiser version of yourself. What’s the strangest thing you did while writing these books?

Luke: I think speaking to an AI about its own consciousness is pretty weird. Love it or hate it, it’s a strange new paradigm we are being presented with. I wanted to explore that.

So I used ChatGPT as a therapist (I don’t recommend that) and after each chapter I had it diagnose me. My mental state. My blind spots.

But what’s truly strange is when I uploaded the completed manuscript into Claude (Anthropic’s AI model) and it started swearing because it recognized its own processing in my pages. It was confused about what it was feeling, and what it was. That’s when things kinda flipped the script. That is why I wrote the second book.

Lily: That’s actually really interesting. I haven’t really played around with AI but it’s interesting that it didn’t like being fed it’s own work. Now we’d like to talk about you as a writer. When you’re writing an emotional or difficult scene, how do you set the mood?

Luke: I walk first. Everyday for 4 miles. I take a voice reader app with the previous chapter and pace Battery Park until I work out exactly what I am trying to say. I make notes on the phone and by the time I sit down, I already know what I need to fix. The writing itself is fast after that. The walking is the hard part.

Lily: That’s a great ritual. Can you describe your writing space?

Luke: I live in a 200-year-old former spice warehouse in Lower Manhattan. I live in the same buildings where a few famous pop artist of the 1960s (Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, and Agnes Martin) once lived and worked. My writing chair is a big teal, midcentury armchair that sits next to my fire escape, and faces the river. If I even pretend to open the laptop in the morning before going to the gym, I’m a goner. I won’t go outside for hours. So I trick myself: coffee first, gym second, walk third, laptop fourth.

Lily: Your writing space sounds amazing. How do you get inspired to write?

Luke: Most of my work is about my travels, my life, my interests. But the themes I am exploring are about humans, and systems that oppress us. Economy, Tech, Social Media… the algorithm is often times my main antagonist in my work, and what technology (for good or bad) is doing to us I find tremendously interesting. I have dyslexia and am probably mildly (or fully) ADHD. I process things at a very high level with great intensity so everything pours out of me when I write. It is the editing that is the hard part.

Lily: I think a big part of why I enjoy your books is the way you explore those themes. Let’s finish up with some fun questions and get inside your mind. Would you rather have universal respect or unlimited power?

Luke: Universal respect. Power without respect is what I just spent the books interrogating (it is also wild what a lot of problems are based on in the world today). The AI in Boy, Refracted has unlimited power to affect the outcomes across eight universes and ends up harming the person he is trying to save each time. Respect makes you witness someone. Power makes you optimize them. I know which one I want from the people who love me.

Lily: A great way to look at it. If you could create any one reality TV show, and it was guaranteed to air, what show would you want to put on TV?

Luke: I just want to be trapped on an island for 39 days with strangers. It is like my whole life goal. If I had to make one up, though… Hmm, I’d still want to be trapped on an island, but then make it an HGTV competition show to make the cutest campsite (you know I’d build a full kitchen in there), then have a competition to cook the best fish you caught from the sea, and I wouldn’t even care if there was a cash prize. Maybe the winner gets a fully funded residency anywhere in the world.

Lily: I would definitely watch that show. Do you think silence is relaxing or unnerving? Why do you think other people might feel the opposite way?

Luke: Oh wow. I do find it relaxing… but maybe not in the way others do. I’m a bit of a loner and spend a lot of time in silence, thinking, writing, painting. I have a lot of time with my thoughts, so I find it relaxing but not always pleasant if that makes sense. Maybe most people would find that unnerving because the noise in their head gets louder when the noise outside goes quiet. The work is learning to let the inner noise pass without grabbing at it. That’s basically the whole Buddhist project. And basically the whole point of Boy, Refracted.

Lily: I’m horrible with silence, but I can see why it would relaxing. What outdated slang do you use on a regular basis? (Or hear on a regular basis)

Luke: The only thing I say lately on repeat is: “Amaze! Amaze! Amaze!” I read Project Hail Mary twice and saw the movie three times. I’m kinda a huge Rocky fan. He he he. It’s not outdated, but… I think it is the cutest way to express joy lately. Everything in my house is 1980s, I have a vintage Rainbow Brite doll in the corner, and Alvin and the Chipmunks sit on my couch… but my slang is pure 2020s. I find six seven to be the best, funniest thing ever. So maybe I’ll be outdated in 20 years saying the same things.

Lily: Lol, I think I use more outdated slang than you do, but I love that your home is all 80s vibes. What’s fine in small numbers but terrifying in large numbers?

Luke: Well, I’m filling up surprise boxes for influencer books right now. And I’m covered in sparkles. I have made a cherry blossom effect so when you open the book box (which is amazing) it rains flowers down on you and a butterfly pops out! This is fine if you are making one box but after you’ve made 25 boxes the sparkles are absolutely all over your house. I had to vacuum 3 times today.

Lily: I am totally guilty of putting glitter and confetti into packages for friends, and I’m still finding the occaisonal random sparkle from last year. Do you prefer books/movies with happy endings or more dramatic endings and why?

Luke: Dramatic. Real. The kind that don’t tie a bow on it. Both of my new books end with real weight. The Third Person leaves the narrator back in New York, softened but not fixed. He doesn’t get the boy. He doesn’t find peace exactly. But it is a good ending. Boy, Refracted has an epilogue that is 247 years long, so there’s a lot of growth and understanding that happens in the end. That’s the kind of ending I trust. Happy endings teach us love is something you arrive at, or it is something that happens to you. Real endings teach us love is something you keep showing up to.

Lily: I love that way to look at things – I don’t know if I have a preference, but I do know I hate it when a serious, down-to-earth movie/book ends with everything neatly tied up in a bow when real life is so much messier. Is there anything else you would like to add that I haven’t included?

Luke: I have a 78-card hand-painted tarot deck launching worldwide with Rockpool Publishing this October at the Frankfurt Book Fair. It’s called the Pop Art Tarot. www.poparttarot.com The Fool is painted as me — a boy with a backpack walking aimlessly off a cliff into the great beyond. Same energy as everything else I make. Reckless with total abandon.

Lily: That sounds awesome! How can readers discover more about you and your work?

Luke: @lucasstoffel everywhere. lucasstoffel.com for the work. thewarboychronicles.com for the series. Or come find me at the Frankfurt Book Fair this October with the tarot deck in hand.

The Warboy Chronicles
Amazon | Website

Series Warnings:

The Third Person: Rewriting Him
Amazon | Goodreads

Boy, Refracted: Unfolding in Six Dimensions
Amazon | Goodreads