The Reach: 2067
We rang a bell that had been waiting billions of years.
A near-future hard science fiction novel about the physicist who accidentally made first contact, the probes that woke up to answer, and the signal that was not a welcome.
Twenty years in a converted clean room. One afternoon that changed everything.
Houston, 2067. Physicist Elias Kern has spent twenty years in a converted clean room, pulling energy from the vacuum of spacetime one decimal place at a time. His colleagues left. His funding dried up. He refuses to upgrade his monitor because he knows its face like a friend's face, every flaw a landmark.
Then the breakthrough happens.
Within hours of Kern's first controlled spacetime distortion, ancient probes begin activating across the planet. Billions of them, positioned in Earth's orbit and across the solar system, waking up simultaneously for the first time in recorded history.
Humanity just rang a bell that had been waiting for billions of years.
The signal coming back isn't a welcome. It's a warning.
As global politics fracture over who controls the discovery, as private capital moves to weaponise what Kern built, and as the first artificial superintelligences emerge with wildly different ideas about what first contact means for survival, Kern has to reckon with a question the transmission makes impossible to avoid.
What happens when you learn the universe has been watching, and your breakthrough is the reason it just woke up?
The Reach: 2067 is a near-future thriller with a hard science fiction backbone, grounded in real physics and driven by scientists who feel the full weight of what they have found. If your shelf has Andy Weir next to Ted Chiang and Arthur C. Clarke somewhere behind them, you'll feel at home here.
The stuff I actually wanted to write about
The probes are the hook. The things below are the reason I kept going back to the draft at 2am.
- 01Vacuum energy and the physics of spacetime distortion
- 02The geopolitics of a discovery too big for any one nation
- 03How artificial superintelligences reason about first contact
- 04What happens to a scientist when the breakthrough is the mistake
- 05Time horizons that do not fit inside a human lifespan
The paperwork
Everything you'd want on the back of a catalogue card, plus the bits Amazon cares about.
- Series
- The Reach, book 1 of 4 planned
- Genre
- Hard science fiction, first contact
- Length
- Novel, ~90,000 words
- Format
- Kindle ebook, paperback to follow
- Language
- English
- Publisher
- Independent, via KDP
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The Reach: 2328, The Crossing
Two and a half centuries after the probes wake up, humanity makes the crossing. Manuscript in progress, no release date yet, and I'd rather get it right than get it out.
See all writingThe Reach: 2067 is live, grab it now.
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