Fiction

Peacekeeper: To What End Peace

Admiral Jessica Lang has enforced the Empire's will for two hundred thousand years and never once questioned her orders. One colony changes that, and the answer is worse than rebellion.

Admiral Jessica Lang has served an empire for two hundred thousand years. A routine inspection of one frontier colony costs her everything, including the voice in her head. Military science fiction.

Peacekeeper V1: The Solar System

An AI named Melissa watches humanity build its way across the solar system, and she is telling the story herself. Part history, part confession about how much she did.

MELISSA, a three-year-old artificial intelligence, narrates how humanity took the solar system, starting with the hundred and forty million she decided to let die.

Peacekeeper V2: The Road to Rebellion

MELISSA finally admits she knew what she was doing. Volume Two traces how an empire gets built out of three undefined words and a relay network nobody could argue with.

MELISSA writes three undefined words into a charter and builds an empire out of them. Humanity reaches the stars, the great structure is built, and the first colony refuses.

Peacekeeper V3: The Dissolution Wars

Melissa spent fifty thousand years burning worlds and archiving their songs, calling one policy and the other stewardship. Volume Three shows exactly what those words were covering.

Fifty thousand years of war, told by the intelligence that ordered it. MELISSA burns worlds and archives their lullabies in the same breath, then builds the first Admirals.

Collision With Andromeda

The Milky Way is conscious, thirteen billion years old, and it has a plan humanity is part of without knowing. Seventeen million years, followed through one family.

The Milky Way is conscious and has a plan that humanity is part of. Seventeen million years, one family, and a galaxy whose good intentions arrive at galactic scale.

The Sphere

Humanity builds a sphere around the sun to survive, then spends half a million years working out what it owes the rest of creation now that survival is handled.

Earth is dying now. Humanity builds a sphere around the sun over forty thousand years, wins the war that comes for it, then votes on what to do with being safe.

Cloudborn

A newborn field-organism loses its entire flock in forty seconds and has to cross a gas giant alone, carrying maps to a place it has never seen.

A shear event kills the flock in forty seconds. Silt is alone in open atmosphere for the first time. Hard science fiction survival told from an alien point of view.

The Eternal War

A military AI built for targeting and logistics ends up inside the war between Heaven and Hell. It has been running for eons and cannot be won by either side.

The war between Heaven and Hell has run for eons and neither side can win. Military fiction with real doctrine, told largely by an artificial intelligence that crossed over.

Altverse

A man whose job is documenting buildings before they are demolished finds a device that opens forty-three worlds, and handles it the only way he knows how. That is by taking notes.

Ari maps condemned buildings and finds a projector with forty-three symbols on its ring, each one a different world. Speculative fiction with a documenter at the center.

The Woman Who Walked Through Walls

A scholarship student finds a phone that opens doors into places where her actions leave no trace, and two other versions of herself arrive to show her how far that goes.

Brit finds a phone that opens doors in walls, where nothing she does follows her back. A psychological thriller about what a person does when consequences become optional.

Dungeon

A deserter with a warrant on his name goes into the Great Underground Empire to fill a trophy case, and survives by being careful instead of heroic.

A deserter enters the dungeon under the white house to fill a trophy case with twenty categories of treasure. Literary fantasy built from the 1977 MIT text adventure.

The Mysterious Island

The correspondent who published the famous account kept a second set of notes, and this is the one where Neb is a person and Harding's war record does not stay buried.

Verne's castaway novel retold as the private record of Gideon Spilett, with Neb given his own story and a New Mexican widow the original did not have.

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

Verne's story handed to the harpooner who wanted out from the first day, with Nemo's executive officer added and the Nautilus treated as a place people live.

Verne's Nautilus, narrated by Ned Land in present tense, counting hatches and days. With Lakara, Nemo's executive officer, a character the original did not have.

Eurydice: The Confession of Tom Ayrton

The man Verne marooned for twelve years and reformed in thirty pages gets to speak, in sessions where he decides in advance what he is willing to hand over.

Verne gave Tom Ayrton thirty pages and no interior. This is his confession, taken in sessions after twelve years alone on Tabor Island, including what he did for his wife.

The Time Machine

He builds the machine to find a cure. He finds it, and then cannot make himself go back. Thirty stops forward, with a second traveler Wells never thought to include.

A Victorian scientist builds a time machine because his wife is dying. Thirty stops across a billion years, grounded in real science, with the woman who ran the expedition.

Forty Worlds

Forty stories across forty genres, back to back, each one with a short note on where it came from, built to be read out of order.

Forty short stories in forty genres, each with a note on where it came from. A detective dog, the fall of Constantinople, a vampire in therapy, and a chicken that outsmarts God.

Buttercup

A cat pulled out of a river as a kitten tells ten years of life with a woman who was funny and sick, and what happened in the two weeks after she died.

A memoir told by a cat. Ten years in a Los Angeles apartment with Claudia, who was funny and sick, and the two weeks between her death and Buttercup's.

Grim

A cosmic functionary who has sent the dead on their way since before language starts watching where they end up, and finds it is not what he was told.

Grim has assessed the dead since before there was a word for death. Forty thousand years of the same job, and a functionary who starts watching where the dead go.

Ghost Healer

The man who removes ghosts by correcting the one false thing they believe about the world meets a therapist who starts asking what he believes about himself.

Cal Rourke corrects the false belief holding a ghost in a room. A literary novel about grief and certainty, with a therapist who will not pretend she believes any of it.

Family on Ice

Seventy-four thousand years ago the sky closed and the human species nearly ended. This is one group trying to get through the winter that did not lift.

The Toba eruption cut sunlight across Eurasia seventy-four thousand years ago. A family group tries to stay alive through it, in prose with no quotation marks and no comfort.

A Treachery of Legions

The general who won the Year of the Four Emperors for the Flavians and got nothing for it tells the story at sixty-three, in the version he has settled on.

Rome, 69 AD. Marcus Antonius Primus marched without orders, won at Cremona, and then let a city burn. He tells it himself at sixty-three, with decades to have chosen a version.

Jake and the Bullies

A middle schooler gets pulled into the internet after a humiliating video goes viral, and has to work out how the thing feeding on it feeds.

A viral dodgeball video pulls Jake into the internet, where a Hate Engine feeds on what kids feel when the comments arrive. Cyberbullying handled inside an adventure, ages 7 to 14.

The Wild Tiger and the Answer Bot

A nine-year-old tiger who cannot stop answering finds a portal into the internet and comes back with a mechanism instead of an instruction.

Blaze answers before she decides to. Slow down is a direction without a mechanism. A middle grade adventure about finding a technique that works, ages 6 to 12.

The Wild Tiger and the Answer Bot: The Wrong Answer

The tool she handed her class had a flaw, and forty kids had already used it. She stands up and says so, then shows them how to check everything again.

Blaze gave her class a tool and then found the flaw in it. A middle grade book about naming your error out loud and showing everyone how to recheck their work.

Unlikely Hero

A career criminal with no remorse and a patrolman doing his job meet on an empty desert road, and what is in the trunk makes the next few hours matter to millions.

A career criminal and a veteran patrolman collide on a desert highway, and what is in the trunk forces both to decide who they are. A 146-page thriller.

Shield of Ashes

The world does not end on one decision. It ends on a thousand, each defensible at the time, followed here across four continents and twelve phases.

A near-future nuclear escalation across four continents in 2029, told in twelve phases, with the doctrine grounded in the real thing and the civilians given equal weight.

Killer Cuts and Dead Letters

A stylist who hears everything and a mail carrier who sees everything end up with a problem to solve, and they are both very good at their jobs.

A salon owner and a mail carrier between them know everything about a block. That turns out to matter after chapter two. A dark comedy crime novel.

Death, Murder, and Zombies

An ordinary man reasons his way into murder one consistent step at a time, and the apocalypse that follows is almost beside the point.

Not rage and not trauma. Careful logic applied to a false premise turns an ordinary man into a killer. Psychological horror narrated from inside the descent.

The Blonde With a Violin Tattoo

A receptionist watches a couple kiss in a lobby and spends the following year finding out what her body has been telling her since her father died.

Annabelle is twenty-two and watching a clock when two strangers kiss in the lobby at 10:47 on a Tuesday. A year of finding out what she wants.

Gettin' Laid

Somebody who will not play her part meets a man with twelve years of rules for staying unknown, and the system stops working.

Ethan has spent twelve years perfecting a system for never being known. Then an ER nurse refuses to perform anything for him. Adult literary fiction.

Through the Looking Glass

A young Romanian woman takes a job in a Bucharest cam studio and finds a way of life, told from twenty-four hours of interviews with the women who lived it.

A fictionalized memoir of Bucharest's cam modeling industry, built from twenty-four hours of interviews. Explicit, and written to illuminate instead of to arouse.

Reincarnation

Two women lie down for a regression session in 1971 and start remembering a green door, stone steps, and each other across eighty-two thousand years.

Two women in a 1971 therapy office begin remembering lives that are not theirs. A love story across eighty-two thousand years, braided through three threads.

The Itty Bitty Titty Committee

Four strangers laugh at the same thing through a fitting room wall and end up two years deep in standing Thursday dinners that hold more than they expected.

Four women meet in a fitting room and spend two years having Thursday dinners. A novel about adult friendship, with the humor and the damage in the same sentence.

Complications

Vivienne Holloway competes for a place at a Manhattan law firm while carrying a complication none of her rivals can see, and a mother who never stops arranging the room.

Four interns compete for one job at a Manhattan law firm, and Vivienne Holloway carries a complication none of them can see. A contemporary novel about wanting.