Shards of Earth, book 1 of the Final Architecture series, is out in the UK today! (US readers will see their edition in August, so apologies for that.)

This is the start of my space opera series, meaning it's SF where I get to play with toys that probably couldn't exist under real physics, such as FTL travel and artificial gravity. Given that it's me, of course, the precise parameters for how all this works in the book got pretty intricate and expanded to become the core of what's going on

In Shards of Earth, the aforementioned Earth got twisted into an avant-garde sculpture by a moon-sized entity known as an Architect, prompting a centiry long 'war' that was mostly just humans fleeing across the galaxy as their colonies were served similarly, one by one. Humans developed a secret weapon known as Intermediaries, people whose surgically-mauled brains were able to reach out and contact the Architects. And as soon as they managed that, the Architects just… left.

Fifty years later, Idris, one of the last of the original Ints, is keeping his head down on a tatty old salvage ship known as the Vulture God. Ints are also able to navigate ships through unspace without having to stick to the existing pathways between star systems, making them fantastically valuable to commercial and military traffic. Hence, from being war heroes, Intermediaries are now a commodity, made wholesale out of convicts and undesirables in a ruinously wasteful process. Idris, who has neither aged nor slept since the war, just wants to stay under the radar. Until, on one of their deep-space salvage jobs, the crew of the Vulture God find fresh evidence that the Architects are back…

The universe of Shards of Earth was (and continues to be, as I'm currently working on the third and final volume) enormous fun to write. It's full of alien cultures, weird planets and outrageous characters. A couple of my favourites amongst the supporting cast include Aklu the Unspeakable (the Razor and the Hook) an alien gangster… or maybe gangster, because it's sufficiently alien that what it thinks of its role in events is entirely opaque; and Trine, a colony of cybernetic insects (of course!) originally created as a records repository for archaeologists which has, through dint of just existing for decades longer than intended, become a self-proclaimed expert in the field.

A few links:

You can get signed hardback copies from Forbidden Planet here.

Bookshop.org

Amazon

And here's the Amazon Audible link for the Audiobook, read by Sophie Aldred.