Some people fall in love with stories. Others fall in love with storytellers. For the author of Percentile Human Tissue, it was always both. Stories arrived through every possible medium — books, films, and music — each offering its own rhythm, its own hidden code. Songs, in particular, became cryptic companions: tiny narrative machines that revealed new meanings years later, long after he had confidently assigned his own. But the greatest stories of all were found in the mouths of uncles, strangers and pub-room philosophers. These were the natural performers, the ones who could hold a crowd with nothing more than a raised eyebrow or a perfectly timed pause.
They were the first people to show him that a well-told story can electrify a room. And perhaps that early magnetism explains a decade spent wandering through Scotland’s pubs and clubs searching for characters — and the magic they carried.
The Making of a Storyteller
What ultimately pushed him toward writing, however, wasn’t nightlife but the solitude of long-haul travel. After years on building sites and at the helm of workboats, he left for Southeast Asia and the Americas armed with a backpack, curiosity, and the promise of a world far bigger than the one he knew.
In the 1990s, before smartphones and Wi-Fi, internet cafés were the crossroads of the backpacker world — humming rows of computers in tin-roof shacks. That was where his writing began. Between jungle treks, border crossings and long nights on sleeper buses, he wrote. He typed, edited, rewrote, and sent dispatches to the handful of people who even had email.
Travel didn’t just expand his perspective; it unlocked something.
“I’d gone searching for myself in mountains and jungles,” he says, “but I came alive in those neon-lit computer booths.”
For him, travel remains something every citizen should experience — a shock to the system powerful enough to disrupt bad habits, break harmful cycles and widen one’s sense of possibility.
Returning home, he began writing seriously. The result is his latest and most ambitious work yet.
ABOUT THE BOOK: “Percentile Human Tissue”
Percentile Human Tissue (PHT) is a collection of twelve interlinked short stories, each with recurring characters, that together form a single, unsettling narrative about the moral disintegration of humanity.
The premise is bold, imaginative and deeply original:
A Future Where Human Tissue Is the Universe’s Most Precious Commodity
In this distant, deranged future, human tissue is scarce — astronomically valuable and terrifyingly finite. With every new story in the collection, the average mass of living tissue decreases. Humanity is literally thinning out.
At the centre of it all is MeritsOne, a biologist-chemist genius caught in a nightmare of his own making. His creations — the PHTs — are part robot, part chemical experiment, and only a fraction human. They were built to survive, to explore, to build a better future.
Instead, they became something else.
A Species on a Death March
The PHTs have already incinerated four planets in their pursuit of a utopia that resembles extinction more than enlightenment. They move through the galaxy leaving nothing alive behind them. Their evolution has stripped them of empathy, compassion and restraint — qualities MeritsOne has spent years trying, and failing, to engineer back into them.
His work — to design kindness, to construct a soul — has collapsed under the weight of their growing violence.
Now, MeritsOne has reached a devastating conclusion:
His creations are not the future of humanity.
They are a virus, and he may be the only one capable of stopping them.
Style, Tone & Impact
The stories unfold as a series of layered, intricately woven episodes, blending philosophy, dark humour, science and satire into a single evolving tapestry. They twist and shift in unexpected directions, each revelation subtly refracting the meaning of the tales that came before it. The tone is often bleak, yet threaded with a sharp, surprising wit that cuts through the darkness. And for all its fantastical world-building, the collection remains rooted in something unmistakably human.
What emerges is a mosaic of a civilisation spiralling toward oblivion — a future in which technology has outrun morality, and the last fragile remnants of humanity are measured, quite literally, in grams.
Verdict
Percentile Human Tissue is a bold, disturbing and wildly imaginative work. It examines what remains of humanity when empathy becomes optional, when technology overrides conscience, and when the search for perfection mutates into self-destruction.
It is part sci-fi, part moral fable, part dark comedy — and wholly original.
The author’s lifelong obsession with storytelling — from barroom anecdotes to travel-email dispatches — has sharpened his instinct for pacing, character and voice. Each story is a compact, volatile universe that detonates into something larger when read together.
This is speculative fiction with teeth: sharp, strange, thought-provoking, and impossible to forget.
