Progress

My editor-at-large Nick and I have settled on a structure. Instead of one large book, there'll now be three smaller ones:

• Rumours of War
• Hiraeth
• The Spiral Tribe

The trilogy is called The Spiral Tribe.

Hiraeth is a word from Welsh. It means homesickness tinged with grief or sadness over the lost or departed.

The Spiral Tribe? That was the name of a radical dance faction in the days of illegal warehouse raves. You'll have to wait to see what it means in the context of these stories.

Working Cover

This is the cover I put together at the start of the project, for inspiration. It's just a bit of history now. Vinnie Chong is creating a real one.

Epigraph

The story I have to tell is the history of the next two 
centuries. For a long time now our whole civilization has been 
driving, with a tortured intensity growing from decade to 
decade, as if towards a catastrophe: restlessly, violently, 
tempestuously, like a mighty river desiring the end of its
journey, without pausing to reflect, indeed fearful of  reflection.
Where we live, soon nobody will be able to exist.

Friedrich Nietzsche - The Will to Power

Prologue

Time flows strange, out in the big empty.

Nothing seems to move, so far from gravity, as far from anything as it is possible to be.

Nothing but the ship, and the object she set out to pursue, millennia before.

For thousands of years the pursuit had been by mathematics alone, but now she could perceive it, a tumbling cube, unreflective black.

They were close, out there in the big empty.

∞

In the visual wavelengths of the beings that made her, the galaxies were wispy spirals. In the X-ray spectrum they blazed like multicolored jewels.

Andromeda now spanned a tenth of her celestial sphere. The orange giant αAndromedae had become the brightest star in her firmament.

And still she sailed on.

It took her breath away, the austere majesty of it all.

∞

Her sails were lenticular discs, kilometers across. They required electrical energy to interact with the quantum tide. Energy she couldn’t afford to expend. Power she’d need to turn round.

She was a dense knot of circuitry with useless butterfly wings.

Sometimes she thought of just powering on, conserving her momentum, gathering her quarry in her energetic skirts as she accelerated by, but she had work to do.

Her crew agreed. A billion humans, living in her virtuality.

Time was a coin they were ready to spend.

Their destination was the future.