Ransom Stephens

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Ransom Stephens

Goodreads Author


Born
Oakland, The United States
Website

Twitter

Genre

Influences

Member Since
June 2007

URL


Author, speaker, and physicist, Ransom Stephens writes fantasy, science fiction, and popular science. His high concept fiction puts characters that make you laugh and cry at the center of conflict.

His latest, The Book of Bastards, is a rollicking, bawdy fantasy of chivalry and revenge. It comes out on January 14, 2020 and the e-book is being sold for $0.99 only as pre-order, on the launch date it goes to full retail!

In Too Rich to Die and The 99% Solution, three keyboard-wielding musketeers take you around the world on thrill rides that will leave you questioning centuries of world history; The Sensory Deception is a story of environmentalism and idealism gone wrong; and his first novel, The God Patent, is a perspective-altering story of s
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Popular Answered Questions

Ransom Stephens The idea for The Sensory Deception came from a newspaper article: "A polar bear that swam more than 200 miles in near-freezing waters to reach Iceland…moreThe idea for The Sensory Deception came from a newspaper article: "A polar bear that swam more than 200 miles in near-freezing waters to reach Iceland was shot on arrival."
I started wondering: what if people could experience the struggles of endangered animals? Would it alter their perspective? Change their politics?
Then I got the idea for "sensory saturation." The concept of sensory saturation comes from something we've all experienced: panic. When you're in an emergency situation, your awareness focuses on right now; no more than a second ahead or behind. If we could keep the here and now but remove the panic, you'd find yourself in the state of mind of intelligent nonlinguistic animals. Mammals and birds make decisions based on past experience, but they don't have the processing power to contemplate or reflect on those experiences. Sensory saturation is a threshold beyond which the brain is so overwhelmed by sensory data that it switches gears from reflective thinking to the immediate process-and-response that animals experience.
Once my research confirmed the validity of sensory saturation, sensory deception was kind of obvious. From there, it was just daydreaming up a Farley Mowat-like protagonist and a Heath Ledger's Joker-like antagonist and the plot sort of took on its own.(less)
Average rating: 3.59 · 1,072 ratings · 142 reviews · 10 distinct worksSimilar authors
The God Patent

3.51 avg rating — 474 ratings — published 2009 — 11 editions
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The Sensory Deception

3.60 avg rating — 394 ratings — published 2013 — 8 editions
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The Left Brain Speaks, the ...

3.55 avg rating — 155 ratings11 editions
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The Book of Bastards

4.52 avg rating — 23 ratings2 editions
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The 99% Solution

4.08 avg rating — 12 ratings — published 2018 — 6 editions
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Too Rich to Die (The Time W...

4.29 avg rating — 7 ratings4 editions
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Digital Communications Test...

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4.50 avg rating — 6 ratings — published 2007 — 7 editions
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Your Pursuit of Greatness -...

4.50 avg rating — 2 ratings — published 2011 — 3 editions
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More books by Ransom Stephens…

ICE: With great power comes great responsibility!

ICE will soon be a greater force than the combination of the FBI, DEA, ATF, and Secret Service, accountability shouldn’t be too much to ask for.

Photo by Jean on Unsplash

ICE’s budget will soon increase by more than 300%. It will become the largest law enforcement agency in America, a bigger force than the FBI, DEA, ATF, and Secret Service combined.

ICE must be held accountable for its actions. ICE o

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Published on August 01, 2025 16:15
The 99% Solution Too Rich to Die
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4.16 avg rating — 19 ratings

In the Woods
Ransom Stephens is currently reading
by Tana French (Goodreads Author)
bookshelves: currently-reading
read in August 2020
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Ransom Stephens Ransom Stephens said: " She got me. I'll be reading everything she writes.
Mystery with personal conflict and perfectly managed romance-aspects that make even coldhearted bastards like me root for the relationship.
My guess on page 47 was way off, my guess on page 110 was ev
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The Invention of ...
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Like Water and Ot...
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Ransom’s Recent Updates

Ransom Stephens wrote a new blog post

ICE: With great power comes great responsibility!

ICE will soon be a greater force than the combination of the FBI, DEA, ATF, and Secret Service, accountability shouldn’t be too much to ask for.Photo Read more of this blog post »
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Quotes by Ransom Stephens  (?)
Quotes are added by the Goodreads community and are not verified by Goodreads. (Learn more)

“Love is a verb. When it becomes a noun, it's over."

from "The God Patent" by Ransom Stephens”
Ransom Stephens, The God Patent

“if you love something, let it go; if it doesn’t come back, then simulate it in software.”
Ransom Stephens, The God Patent

“men who identified with flags more than they did with the people they led had a proclivity for failure, and failure meant death. Sometimes it meant genocide.”
Ransom Stephens, The Sensory Deception

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