The Marionette
A science-fiction thriller
Geneticist Reed Faraday has spent a decade watching her talent go to waste. Then a red point of light appears on her hand—and an intelligence beyond Earth begins directing her movements.
First contact
Reed’s hand moves against her will, filling page after page with code. The red mark comes and goes. The numbers remain.
As a girl, she solved ciphers with her grandfather, a wartime cryptographer. Now an unknown intelligence is drawing on the gift she has neglected—and reaching into memories she has tried to leave behind.
With her colleague Lloyd Solomon, Reed begins to investigate. Whatever is contacting her has already saved her life. She still doesn’t know what it wants in return.
A signal. A destination.
Four hundred miles from home, Reed finds an empty stretch of desert. No explanation. No one waiting for her.
But someone knows she has been there.
Back in San Francisco, a stranger is sitting in her living room. He knows her work, her family and the hopes her employer has spent years keeping out of reach.
The red mark begins to blink.
Screen adaptation
On the brink of suicide after a decade of wasted scientific talent, geneticist Reed Faraday is seized by an invisible extraterrestrial force that can control her like a marionette—and compelled to uncover a corporate conspiracy and use her gifts for a purpose larger than herself.
In the vein of The Queen’s Gambit, Arrival and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
For film and television
The novella
A scientist’s search for meaning becomes an encounter with an intelligence that can reach into her thoughts, her memories—and her future.
The Marionette is a humanist science-fiction thriller by Robert Ian Simpson.
About the author
Robert Ian Simpson studied psychology and film at Vassar College and earned his MFA at the American Film Institute, where he received the William J. Fadiman Prize for his screenplay about Mary Shelley.
The Black List produced The Monsters of Mary Shelley as an EarMovie starring Joanne Froggatt. He also wrote, produced and co-directed the short film Lightning Bugs in a Jar, starring Ethan Slater.