About
I write the kinds of futures I cannot stop thinking about.
They usually begin with a question that feels a little too close. What happens when AI does the work? When a country decides how children should be born? When belief has to survive superintelligence? Then I follow the people who have to live in those futures.
I want to write books you pass to someone else because you need to talk about what just happened.
Most books begin for me with something I cannot leave alone: a question, a world, or a person I want to understand. I follow that curiosity through the first draft. Then I edit and edit until the story works for someone beyond me, too. Until the book is hard to put down, and harder to leave behind.
Here is what kept me writing each one.
The Human Relief Project
I wanted to explore a plausible world without work, and what it does to someone who finds his purpose in freeing everyone else from it.
Birthright
Grace drew me in because she begins with a view of birth and family almost opposite to ours, then has to make a choice neither world can make for her.
Novel #3
I wanted to follow a woman who creates a faith she believes in, then watches it grow into something she can no longer fully control.
Short press bio
Max Malterer is a Berlin-based author of near-future fiction. His novels The Human Relief Project and Birthright imagine plausible shifts in technology and society, then follow the people who have to live with the consequences.
Alongside his fiction, he works in strategy and has worked across nonprofit and technology organizations. That experience shapes how he writes about institutions and the people living within them.