Sebastian Pearce spent fifteen years studying the peculiar ways humans adapt to controlled environments before realizing he’d been conducting his own psychological experiment on undergraduate students every semester. A former behavioural neuroscientist turned creative writing professor, Pearce holds a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Edinburgh and has published extensively on circadian rhythm disruption and environmental conditioning—research that now provides deliciously unsettling material for his fiction.
His transition from academia to speculative writing began during a sabbatical in 2019, when he discovered that his detailed observations of laboratory rat behavior translated remarkably well to crafting stories about humans trapped in systems of their own making. Pearce’s scientific background infuses his fiction with an unnerving plausibility that has readers questioning whether his dystopian scenarios might already be unfolding in their own lives.
Currently teaching experimental narrative techniques at a Russell Group university in the Midlands, Pearce is known for assigning his students exercises that blur the line between psychological research and creative writing. His tutorials are legendarily popular, though students often leave feeling slightly more paranoid about their daily routines than when they arrived.
When not crafting stories that make readers examine their smartphone usage patterns, Pearce can be found maintaining an obsessively organized home library, conducting amateur sleep studies on his rescue cat, and reading everything from J.G. Ballard to contemporary science journals with equal enthusiasm. He lives in a converted Edwardian terraced house in a quiet suburb that his neighbours describe as “impeccably maintained but somehow unsettling,” though he insists the motion sensors in every room are purely for energy efficiency.
Pearce’s speculative fiction explores the intersection of human psychology and technological control, often featuring protagonists who discover that their carefully curated lives might not be as autonomous as they believe. His work has been described as “Kafka meets Black Mirror with a laboratory scientist’s attention to detail.”
He is currently working on a collection of interconnected stories about a research facility that may or may not exist, depending on who’s asking and whether they’ve signed the appropriate confidentiality agreements.
SebPearce.Blog is updated and maintained by Robyn Michaels on behalf of Modern Alchemy. All stories are © Sebastian Pearce 2025
Sebastian Pearce - Flash fiction with an Edge 