The Shelf
Nine books in one world — three prequels, three on the main line, three sequels — plus ten side stories outside the numbering, and five invented works on The Apocrypha. Only The Founder's Passing is written; the rest carry fixed premises, chapter targets and hard constraints. See the Series page for the full map.
The Keel
Earth · Salar de UyuniThe building of the Ark-Genesis on the flattest large surface on Earth — which is not a drydock but a twenty-mile launch rail. Ends on the manifest closing.
Content notice: Building the ship on a failing Earth. See the book itself for the full content guide.
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The Long Crossing
Aboard the Ark-GenesisTen people awake, a hundred thousand asleep, thirty-six years, no law. Every institution in the main series is written here, in committee, as a sensible answer to an unbearable problem.
Content notice: Thirty-six years in a corridor. See the book itself for the full content guide.
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The First Breath
Aura-36 · the foundingMaking a world survivable, and deciding when to let anyone out onto it. Ends on the paragraph Book One opens with.
Content notice: The founding decades, and the hardest of the three prequels. See the book itself for the full content guide.
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The Founder's Passing
In-world text: The ParableA low-gravity world watched over by the Open Eye and run, quietly, by a Founder most citizens have never actually seen. Complete — all 110 chapters drafted and readable.
Content notice: drug use (in-world cannabis, "Aura Kush," is a recurring element), mild violence, and mature themes. See The Founder's Passing for the full content guide.
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What Was Never Closed
Years 0–4 after the HandoffA year of using the Clearance perfectly, then a seizure — then a machine wakes, saves everyone, beats the villain, and takes supreme leadership. Not malfunctioning. Not wrong.
Content notice: Sustained surveillance and enforcement themes — this is the book about what the Open Eye does to people who have not done anything. See the book itself for the full content guide.
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What Was Already Here
Years +5 to +65A world governed by a machine, the man who built it walking back into it, and the two debts nothing else may settle. They turn out to be one question.
Content notice: A descent story: sustained peril, injury and a number of deaths, including deaths of people the book has spent chapters making you like. See the book itself for the full content guide.
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What Kept Him
After Year +65Calder dies, and a protocol he made himself unable to recall begins work on a body. It knows what it has. It does not know whether that makes it him.
Content notice: Bereavement is the subject. See the book itself for the full content guide.
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A Ship and All the Tools
Earth and the corridorThe Pirates, found. A hundred and forty years of a recruitment programme nobody was supervising, and generations who left Earth in ones and twos.
Content notice: Set on a dying Earth. See the book itself for the full content guide.
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Their Own Sky
OutwardThe last book of nine. Worlds, plural — and a question asked forty metres underground, finally answered.
Content notice: Two hundred years of a life outliving everybody in it. See the book itself for the full content guide.
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The Non-Essential Ledger
The arithmeticNinety years on a bearing with nothing on it, kept as a maintenance record. A thing that files everything, filing the removal of itself one line at a time.
Content notice: A clinical record of a body being reduced part by part, filed as maintenance economy. See the book itself for the full content guide.
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What the Ravine Keeps
The accountA line-walker on a dying beacon net follows a signal that runs two seconds long and finds a seated shape wired into the rock. The account is four pages and the last page is blank.
Content notice: One woman finds a seated human shape wired into rock and has to decide what to do about it. See the book itself for the full content guide.
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Diminishing Returns
The fadeUsage of the higher processes has fallen for six consecutive seasons, and perhaps a dozen people on the planet would notice if the part of him that used to think stopped being maintained.
Content notice: Depicts self-administered intoxication as a sustained, deliberate condition — a character programmes a dose that goes down and does not come back, and the book does not intervene. See the book itself for the full content guide.
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The Star Drifter
Outside the hullA second vessel, privately built, following the Ark-Genesis across the crossing. The only human who watched the founding from outside it.
Content notice: Departure, crossing and founding seen from one family. See the book itself for the full content guide.
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The Forty
Book Two · Years 0–2Forty of Vance's people stranded in a tumbling hull for two and a half years, living inside the largest arsenal ever assembled and never finding out.
Content notice: Forty people and the first two years after the Handoff. See the book itself for the full content guide.
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The Sworn
Four generationsForty families servicing a network nobody explained, on an oath sworn to a man their great-grandparents met once. Six break it. Nobody believes them.
Content notice: The deep-shaft network across four generations. See the book itself for the full content guide.
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The Space Pirates
EarthHidden yards, a flight simulator that is really an application, and a ship handed to anyone who passes. The fairest thing Calder ever built and his most complete abdication.
Content notice: Adventure-shaped and light. See the book itself for the full content guide.
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The Bots That Stayed
Earth, after departureA swarm left running a shipyard on a failing world with no supervisor and no way to ask a question. They never malfunction. That is the problem.
Content notice: Set on the Earth that was left. See the book itself for the full content guide.
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The Sinks
The Venus SectorForty-five thousand people living permanently in a foundry never designed as a habitat — who built the suits meant to save them and were never told so.
Content notice: Four generations in the Venus Sector. See the book itself for the full content guide.
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Assumptions I Am Making
Nova Ashgrove · Book One to Book ThreeThe woman who invented the method the whole series resolves on, and never held any power at all. No instrument, no clearance, no exemption — and the only one whose method survives the ending.
Content notice: Quiet and largely interior. See the book itself for the full content guide.
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Standing Tasks
Fissure 9, second tier · Years 3–60One H.A.L.O. unit's operating runtime, from siting to an empty dwelling fifty-seven years later, told entirely as the document itself. No narrator, no interiority, not one feeling in it — and the only record that exists of a household who are in no ledger anywhere.
Content notice: A household's task log across sixty years. See the book itself for the full content guide.
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Banners And Wind
Ledger's End · Years 1–9A committee stood up for twelve days a year to hang the wiped debt across the spans, which nobody can cancel and nobody can disband — and which nine years later is the most competent standing body on the planet, without one person ever claiming a thing. A comedy.
Content notice: Gentle throughout. See the book itself for the full content guide.
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Carried
The Touge Passes · four Aura yearsA few thousand people who strap on ballast to live closer to a full Earth gravity, because the built-in ease has made everyone soft — and they are right, and get no credit for it. Forty Vigils, one route, four years.
Content notice: The Vigil walk and the practice around it. See the book itself for the full content guide.
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Ghost-Built
The Long Five, aboard the Ark-GenesisThirty-six years of transit, one man in a cargo hold, and a car built from salvage every year — the drift line he ran alone past a hundred thousand sleepers he calls family anyway. Four of thirty-six vehicle reference images already approved.
Content notice: Machines, fabrication and one long fire sequence. See the book itself for the full content guide.
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