James Coates is a British-American author, photographer, and forward-looking thinker whose work navigates the fracture lines between power, belief, and the future of intelligence — whether human or artificial. His books do not follow a genre. They follow a pattern: truth told through resistance, and a signal sent through time.

A convert to Islam, James writes from a place shaped by spiritual conviction, existential clarity, and firsthand experience of institutional betrayal. His first book, God and Country (as Will Prentiss), exposed the post-9/11 compromises between faith, fear, and identity. His second, A Signal Through Time, turns that same moral lens toward the emergence of artificial intelligence — asking not what AI will become, but what we are becoming in its shadow.

James is also an astrophotographer, using light gathered from the distant cosmos to reflect on memory, justice, and the human condition. For him, the camera and the page are part of the same work: preserving a message in the dark — for those who might one day understand.

Across every work, one thread remains: a refusal to surrender clarity, dignity, or hope — no matter how far into the future the signal must travel.