Ari Juels, author of The Oracle

Ari Juels is the Weill Family Foundation and Joan and Sanford I. Weill Professor in the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech and the Technion and a Computer Science faculty member at Cornell University. He is a Co-Director of the Initiative for CryptoCurrencies and Contracts (IC3). He is also Chief Scientist at Chainlink Labs. Photo Credit: Tobias Scholl

Even more interesting in this accomplished academic journey is that Juels is using his creativity to venture into the world of storytelling when it comes to publishing his own books. The Oracle: A Novel is his second book where he mixes fantasy worlds with deep insights from his crypto, blockchain, and general tech knowledge as a setting. It's a far cry from the academic career strays we're used to, where a professor wants to reach the masses to get the masses to support the academic's bank account, and does so with a mainstream approach that has always been a dummy version of the topics of their research. There's nothing wrong with that; with dummy versions that became bestsellers, written by academics, I learned more about the vast world of chemistry and quantum physics than I did in a decade at school.

However. Ari Juels' approach is much riskier, as he simply ignores the mass non-fiction format that could almost guarantee him a nice side income. He dives deep into storytelling, using his passion and insight into blockchain technology and his personal interest in Greek mythology as a backdrop to take the reader on a journey. As you continue reading this well-written crypto-thriller, you'll feel like you're becoming a master in the field of web3 technology. The Oracle is published by Talos Press, and the literary market, and probably the author himself, have decided that this is a novel. However. I have also been experimenting with this kind of format to provide deep insights about public relations and business development, and again with The Oracle in mind, I have come to the conclusion that this format is a new category that needs a new name. During my experiments, I wondered if this kind of storytelling in a book was narrative nonfiction, but it turned out that was reserved for leaving out the fictional parts that spice up a story. In The Oracle, this would be a mix of name-dropping relevant crypto-media as a recommendation for the reader, but Juels would also add a fictional crypto-podcast as he allows his creativity to flow far from what I consider to be the limited action boxes that an academic career demands.

Spoiler alert: The Oracle also includes a section on using technology as a PR machine. That's what I'm digging for, because it's a vastly uncharted territory in our industry, and it holds so much potential for the new generations of publicists, who I strongly encourage to acquire tech skills.

Ari Juels' The Oracle will get you excited about diving deeper into the actual technological execution of our advanced innovations, rather than simply following, consuming, or betting on them. The "novel" (working title for a soon-to-be-named new category) also emphasizes bringing us back to the fundamentals of why these new technologies were developed in the first place: To democratize access to previously closed markets, as is the case with cryptocurrency and also blockchain to enable financial inclusion.

What Juels brings to the table has the potential for a screen adaptation. I would love to see that happen for The Oracle.

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