Long before Reed Pederson became a published novelist, he was already building, writing, performing, and imagining. As a young musician in the San Diego area, he played in The NoNames, wrote music, and managed the band. Later, his creative instincts found a different stage: entrepreneurship, investing, business strategy, and emerging technology.
Reed has used the latest technologies to create and grow businesses, including the implementation of artificial intelligence. Working closely with AI led him to a question that was equal parts practical and unsettling: Are we using the technology, or is the technology beginning to use us?
That idea became the spark for Rise of the AInimals, his first published novel.
Reed’s concise, idea-driven style reflects an unusually varied background. He holds degrees in Spanish Literature and Economics as well as an MBA—a combination that brings language, culture, markets, leadership, and human behavior into the same field of view.
His writing experience has taken many forms. He wrote editorials on social issues while serving on the editorial board of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. He wrote songs as a professional musician. He has also written extensive computer code, learning firsthand how carefully designed systems can produce unexpected outcomes.
Each of those experiences informs his fiction. Reed approaches technology not as a distant abstraction, but as a force already changing how people work, compete, communicate, decide, and understand one another.
The novel began with a modern technological concern, but Reed wanted the story to remain personal, entertaining, and human. The fading Silverling circus gave him the perfect setting: a family business built on spectacle and tradition, facing cultural pressure to change. Theo Silverling’s radical solution—artificially intelligent robotic animals—creates hope, wonder, conflict, and danger in equal measure.
Through Theo’s struggle, Reed explores innovation, business succession, family pride, animal welfare, political power, truth, responsibility, and the temptation to believe that a powerful tool can solve a human problem without creating another one.
Reed and his wife live among the rolling hills of western Pennsylvania. As empty nesters, they remain deeply involved in their business endeavors and are not ready to retire. Reed writes on long flights, between 9:00 and 11:00 at night, and—by his own humorous account—whenever his wife allows.
Together, they enjoy travel, sporting events, cooking, gardening, RVing, working, and living life to its fullest. Like his protagonist, Reed meets technological change with determination, imagination, and humor. Most of the time.
