The Bootstrap Paradox
A twenty-second-century atheist trauma surgeon is sent back to 33 CE to perform the resurrection of Jesus as a surgical procedure, and is told she must cross the line from observer to participant.
An observation mission catches ancient light from Jerusalem. The crew, on the deep edge of the solar system, watches the crucifixion and the resurrection unfold not as myth but as an intervention. Bodies move that should not move. Wounds close on a timetable that no first-century technology could engineer. The crew records all of it.
The footage does not answer the question it raises. It fractures the question. Governments, faith communities, families, and the crew itself split along lines that no one expected. An atheist surgeon, a Jesuit priest who was a physicist first, and a sentient ship intelligence are asked to interpret what they have seen, while the institutions on Earth choose between truth and suppression.
What begins as observation becomes obligation. The deeper the crew pulls on the thread, the clearer it becomes that history was not only witnessed but engineered. One of them will eventually be asked to cross into the past and become part of the pattern they uncovered. The cost keeps escalating: what truth demands, what love can survive, and what human beings become when they discover that divinity may be nothing more, and nothing less, than intervention, sacrifice, and care.
The Bootstrap Paradox is David Moss's first novel.
The pattern of a debut arriving with a finished, ambitious science fiction manuscript is not unfamiliar. Andy Weir, Hugh Howey, Frank Herbert. The author is not claiming that company; he is naming the pattern. A debut can land if the book is ready and the writer has done the work of finishing.
The manuscript is finished. It has been through three full revisions and two rounds of professional beta-reader feedback. The first fifty pages are available immediately and openly. The question this site cannot answer is whether the prose holds. That question lives in the pages.
The Bootstrap Paradox is not a Christian novel and it is not an anti-Christian novel.
It takes the events of the Gospels seriously as material, the crucifixion and the resurrection and the women at the tomb, and asks what would change, and what would not change, if the mechanism of those events became visible. The answer the book arrives at is not the one most readers expect from either direction. Early religious readers have responded to it. Secular readers have responded to it. The book does not flatter either audience.
The closest tonal precedent is Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow.
David Moss is a novelist based in Fort Lauderdale. The Bootstrap Paradox is his first.
He spent nineteen years carrying the story before he wrote it. The first draft took twelve months. Three full revisions and two rounds of professional beta-reader feedback followed. The manuscript reached its current form, ninety-nine thousand words and fully edited, in early 2026.
His earlier work has been in music production, broadcasting, and technology. Those careers informed the book and did not produce it. He is named inventor on multiple patents and has published widely on strategy and brand. He has not previously written fiction.
While the novel was being written, a full television pilot and a five-season series bible were drafted, along with a twenty-two-track companion audio drama. None of these are part of the representation ask. They exist because the world of the book asked for them. They are available on request, after the manuscript.