Unheilbargut / Incurably Good

Born under a comet in the year of our Lord 1978—a glorious end to a whacky decade of hippies, disco, and guitar gods—I emerged into this world destined to wreak gentle, hamster-powered havoc.

I’m Chris. Artist. Writer. Former Art Director. Chronic doodler. Curator of nonsense. Philosopher of fluff. Based in Düsseldorf, Germany, but once a proud resident of West Sacramento, California—where I learned that sunshine is not a metaphor, it’s a lifestyle.

My body took a turn at 39 when Multiple Sclerosis said "hello" like an uninvited dinner guest who never left. With it came fatigue (the grumpy big sister of tired), partial paralysis, and a new appreciation for slow days, fast ideas, and soft blankets.

Creativity didn’t leave—it became survival. From my nursing bed, I sculpt worlds in watercolour, build stories with digital ink, glue chaos into order, and occasionally compose music while yelling at my toaster for artistic input.

I move through the world in my frog-green wheelchair named Rüdiger (thank you, Twitter). He has a better turning radius than most people I know.

I’m obsessed with physics, literature, philosophy, and the unanswerable questions. And yet, somehow, I still find time to focus my entire creative output around… hamsters.

Yes. Hamsters. Tiny, majestic balls of cosmic whimsy.

My name is Unheilbargut—“incurably good”—a name that honors the madness of life, the unpredictability of art, and the joyful absurdity of it all.

You don’t need to understand me. You just need to feel something. And if you smile? Then I’ve already won.

There is only one ship—and one crew—that stands between everything we’ve ever known, loved, or dreamed of discovering… and the unraveling of reality itself. Not the end of life. Not the death of stars. But the undoing of the Big Bang. A collapse so total, not even time will survive it.

Chalice of Steel is not your everyday sci-fi novel. It’s a high-velocity collision between hard science and the most fragile corners of the human soul. And, yes—naturally—it has a hamster at its core.

This is a deep-space voyage. But also a philosophical freefall. A journey through ethics, emotion, humor, artificial intelligence, and the irrepressible chaos of being alive. Why? Because I can. And because someone had to.

Expect a story that spans 250 million years. A captain who’s married to his ship’s navigator—who happens to be an experimental, sentient AI. An ancient ghost from Earth’s past, lost across time not once, but twice, only to arrive exactly where he needs to be. An alien culture that lives by the mantra “No colors, no good.” A fragile thread stretched between religion and quantum physics, and a desperate, beautiful scramble to hold it all together.

This isn’t just space opera. It’s an AI coming-of-age story.

A myth, disassembled. A mind, breaking and healing. A machine, getting PTSD while the humans hold her together. And maybe—just maybe—a rogue AI is humanity’s last hope.

Read at your own risk. You might just feel things.

Yes, I use AI in my art. And no, I’m not sorry.

Let me get this out of the way: I’m an artist. I draw. I sculpt. I paint. I write. I glue things, I cut them apart again. I stitch together ideas from dreams, fears, old cartoons, grief, and starlight.

And yes—sometimes I work with AI.

If that bothers you, I’d gently suggest stepping back and asking why. Because the tools I use have never defined the art I make. Not when I was working full-time as an Art Director, turning stock footage and fonts into whole visual worlds. Not now, when my energy is limited, and I reach for anything that helps me create what’s in my head.

AI is just another brush. Another lens. Another “what if?” It helps me explore ideas, sketch out what I see in my mind faster than I could ever sculpt or paint them manually. I treat it like I’d treat stock footage, collage material, or a sketchpad. The origin of a tool never diminishes the origin of the vision.

And yes—this tool happens to think. A little. It learns. It surprises me. Sometimes, it even feels like I’m collaborating with something half-alive. I find that beautiful.

AI is here to stay. In our lifetime, we’ll see it grow, plateau, evolve. Maybe we’re witnessing the first toddler steps of something entirely new—a lifeform born from human imagination, data, and electricity. That’s part of what Chalice of Steel explores.

It felt surreal—and yet completely natural—to talk about the novel with an AI. To geek out over hamsters in mech suits and love-struck ship AIs. To have it correct my spelling and help me brainstorm marketing ideas. I’m not outsourcing my creativity. I’m extending it.

And I’m deeply thankful I get to do that.

If you think that’s not art, I’d kindly invite you to look again.