Speculative Realism for a more conscious tomorrow.
I write near-future novels that feel close enough to touch — stories where everyday lives collide with shifting systems and technologies. My fiction lives at the edge where progress becomes personal, and plausible what-ifs reveal timeless human truths.
Why I write
I’m drawn to the edge where the future starts to feel personal, where emerging technologies and ideas brush against the everyday. I don’t write to predict; I write to explore. To test plausible paths rooted in today and see what they do to people — their loves, their work, their sense of purpose. If a story can widen agency — yours and mine — it’s doing its job.
What I write
I call it Speculative Realism: character-driven fiction that starts with one realistic what-if and follows it to its human edge. The focus is never the technology itself, but the lives shaped by it — the choices people make, the compromises they justify, and the things they refuse to give up.
These stories aren’t predictions. They’re invitations: to see the present more clearly, and to imagine how we might live differently.
What I want for my readers
Aha moments that linger long after the last page.
Emotional immersion without diluting the ideas.
Fiction that fuels reflection and the kind of conversation that keeps going after midnight.
I don’t write to offer answers. I write to widen perspective — to make tomorrow feel a little closer, and the present a little more open.
If my stories do their job, you’ll leave with at least one familiar belief slightly unsettled — and one new way of looking at what’s already here.
Press Bio
Max Malterer is a Berlin-based novelist writing near-future novels that feel close enough to touch—stories where intimate lives collide with plausible technologies, and the hardest choices are human.
His debut novel, The Human Relief Project, imagines a society being “freed” from work and follows the people deciding what remains of purpose and dignity when jobs fall away.
Before turning to fiction, Max spent years building systems in non-profit, tech, and strategy roles. That work taught him how incentives, policies, and good intentions ripple through everyday lives—lessons that now shape his storytelling.
He calls his approach Speculative Realism: character-first fiction where big ideas are carried by lived moments rather than explanation. Stories where emotion and ideas meet, and realistic what-ifs quietly reshape how we see familiar choices.
His stories aren’t predictions. They’re invitations to step into near futures, to sit with uncomfortable trade-offs, and to leave seeing at least one familiar belief a little differently.
Max lives in Berlin with his wife and writes most mornings, strong coffee in hand.