Speculative Fiction, Literary Fiction
Date Published: May 21, 2026
it yet.
If you’ve spent any time in Texas in spring, you know the bluebonnets. Now
imagine a pair of glasses that shows you what you had been missing: every
ultraviolet the flower had been wearing all along, a field suddenly purple, a
world you had been standing inside without seeing.
That is love, for Richard Smith. That is Zin. Richard is the kind of man who
learned early how to disappear. Quiet. Careful. Brilliant in ways he rarely
lets anyone witness. He writes poetry in notebooks no one is allowed to open
and gives his best hours to work that asks nothing of his heart.
Then Zin walks into his life—sharp, guarded, beautiful, and impossible
to reduce—and does the thing he never prepared for.
She sees him.
All of him.
And instead of flinching, she stays. Together, they help bring a technology
into the world that does for millions what Zin did for Richard: it lets people
see what was always there.
Hidden color.
Hidden beauty.
Hidden power.
A cheap, wearable lens that reveals the spectrum just beyond ordinary sight.
For a moment, it feels like freedom. But a world that profits from keeping
people blind does not celebrate new sight.
It studies it.
Owns it.
Sells it.
Weaponizes it.
What began as wonder becomes surveillance.
What began as intimacy becomes empire.
And as the device they helped create starts tracking faces, movements,
desires, and private lives, Richard and Zin are forced to confront the
difference between being seen, being wanted, being protected, and being
controlled.
The world Richard wanted to open is becoming a machine that watches everyone.
And the woman who first opened him may be the only person brave enough to tear
it down.
The Field of Purple Bonnets is a literary speculative love story about being
seen versus being watched. About a man brave enough to be soft, a woman wise
enough to know what that costs, and a country slowly forgetting the difference
between freedom and possession.
Dave J. Brown writes fiction about love, technology, consciousness, and the
strange systems people build to survive themselves. Field of Purple Bonnets is
his most ambitious work to date.
He pays his bills helping organizations navigate enterprise technology
rollouts, building small applications, and consulting on the kinds of complex
implementations that make most people’s eyes glaze over. The technical fluency
shows up in his writing… not as exposition, but as texture. When
Richard designs BeeVision, the engineering feels real because it comes from
someone who thinks in systems.
He lives just south of Austin, not far from a field of bluebonnets that looks
exactly the way you’d imagine.
