No Voice Beyond Question

In a declining northern town, an uncannily attentive pub companion learns exactly what its customers want to hear—and turns their grievances into a movement. A primatologist is summoned to interpret an extraterrestrial ultimatum humanity cannot negotiate. On a rain-soaked Connemara road, a weary salesman meets a figure from folklore who knows his name. And from a besieged radio station, a broadcaster fights to keep every voice answerable as certainty spreads like contagion.

*No Voice Beyond Question* brings together four unsettling works of British and Irish speculative fiction. Across near-future towns, laboratories, mountain roads and emergency airwaves, Tom Byrne asks what remains of human agency when language comforts, classifies and controls; when minds connect too completely; and when a superior intelligence decides that understanding is beyond us.

Dryly funny, intellectually ambitious and increasingly dark, these stories combine ordinary working lives with moments in which reality opens and refuses to close again. They are tales of artificial companionship, first contact, altered consciousness, grief and the dangerous authority of voices that cannot be questioned.

AI disclosure: Tom Byrne conceived, directed and edited these stories. OpenAI’s ChatGPT generated portions of the draft prose and the illustrations under his direction; he selected and revised the final material.