About me
Hi! My name is Étienne (roughly pronounced eight-YEN). I work in AI at Elicit and have been writing for a long time. My blog, Hopeful Monsters, has more than 240 articles since 2020 on topics as varied as the history of technology, cultural evolution, art, and progress. I'm also the creator and active maintainer of the Historical Tech Tree, a visualization of the links between thousands of inventions from prehistory to today. I am a 2025 fellow of the Roots of Progress Institute.
I studied evolutionary biology and computer science, and I occasionally write fiction, including a book of stories about phantom islands. I was raised in the Quebec City area and live in Montreal.
Hopeful Monsters
A “hopeful monster” is a term in the history of evolutionary biology for macromutations, big changes in an organism that usually cause non-viable monsters, but might occasionally — hopefully — produce a valuable innovation. It is the metaphor at the center of my blog, which consists of more than 240 essays since 2020 on history, technology, cultural evolution, art, progress, philosophy, and other topics. From 2020 to 2024 I published every week; now it’s once or twice a month. Feel free to join its 4,000+ subscribers.
Latest post: Two-List Model of Masculinity and Femininity
Historical Tech Tree
The Historical Tech Tree is a timeline of technologies across history and the links between them. Released in 2025 and actively maintained.
Work
As my day job, I work on AI evaluations at Elicit, an AI research assistant. I occasionally write on the Elicit blog.
I previously worked at Druide informatique (language software) and Interintellect, among others.
Misc writing
Published work of various kinds. I am sometimes available for freelance writing projects.
Magazine articles
- King of Fruits — Works in Progress, 2025
- The Elements of Scientific Style — Works in Progress, 2022
- The Universal Tech Tree — Asterisk, 2025
- Architecture piece — Asterisk, forthcoming October 2026
Fiction
- Le professeur de schporte — short story, Zinc, 2013
- Tout Doit Partir Everything Must Go — short story, Moebius no. 151, 2016; adapted as a short film
- Nos corps brutalistes (Our Brutalist Bodies) — science-fiction short story, Brins d’éternité no. 56, 2020
- The 40-Hour Work Week — short story, Monstrous Times
Other
- 1980s Jane Jacobs on Cities, States, and City-States — a review of Cities and the Wealth of Nations and The Question of Separatism; Astral Codex Ten book review contest, 3rd place, 2023
- Why Is Nature Prestigious? — a review of Making Nature; Astral Codex Ten book review contest, finalist, 2022
Atlas of Phantom Islands
An ongoing literary project of stories about fictional islands that have appeared on real maps, sometimes for centuries. Mostly in French but with some stories in English.
Past projects
- The Classical Futurist — a magazine about classical antiquity and the future, 2021–2023
- JAWWS — Journal of Actually Well-Written Science, 2021–2022
- Old blogs — Cartographier tout et n’importe quoi (2017–2020), Dark Gray Matters (2020–2021)
- Studies — evolutionary biology and computer science (McGill, Uppsala, Montpellier, Harvard)
- La Nouvelle-France c’est plate — A comic novel about New France, Quebec history, and filmmaking (unpublished)
The old etiennefd.com, the WordPress site as it was (created 2020, last updated 2024)
Contact
- Twitter: @etiennefd
- Substack: @etiennefd
- GitHub: @etiennefd
About this island
Welcome to my imaginary island. Islands are a constant source of inspiration for me. I live on one — the island of Montreal — and am fascinated by the idea of isolated microcosms, from remote islets in the Pacific to Mediterranean islands layered with history to islands that exist only in myth and mistaken maps.
This small island, laid in the style of a mosaic, represents a small research station in the middle of a fictional sea. A marine lab studies creatures as if it were my blog, Hopeful Monsters. The power plant is a gateway to the Historical Tech Tree. Other pavilions lead to my work and writing. The ruins of a classical temple contain past projects.
Astronomically, the island is located at the latitude and longitude of Montreal. The sun, moon and planets follow their real positions (but not the stars, because I chose a beautiful but implausible starry vault). The weather changes naturally — or can be controlled at the weather station on the hill. You can use the clock tower to jump anywhere in time. I recommend April 8th, 2024, around 3:25 pm.
Around the island, monsters such as sea serpents and strange whales link to random posts from my blog, and ships and aircraft from diverse historical periods go to random inventions from the Historical Tech Tree. There are also many Easter eggs that you can find at specific times or in certain weather. Have fun!
I designed this website with Claude Code in October 2026, through more than 50 prototypes. Blog post on the process forthcoming.
Credits
- Sea monsters: my pixel versions of creatures on Olaus Magnus’s Carta marina (1539).
- Sea sound: arnaud coutancier, “Waves on quay #1”, CC BY-NC 4.0.
- Rain sound: benjaminpott, “Rain by the sea”, Victoria, Australia, CC0.
- Type: EB Garamond, Josefin Sans, IBM Plex Mono.