The Oxygen Wound is out today. Please know what you are buying.
The Oxygen Wound is out today, on Kindle and in paperback. Three hundred and fifty-two pages. Please know what you are buying. There is no villain in this book. Nobody is rescued. The arithmetic is on the page and you are expected to follow it. The central question is never resolved, because the instruments cannot resolve it. If that is the book you want, this is very much that book. What it is: a first-contact novel in which the only vocabulary either party has is arithmetic. Twenty-one messages. Eleven days between each one. Every institution in it behaves reasonably, and that is the problem: the regulator is right, the agency's order to seal the hole is correct policy, and the nine people who stay past the last aircraft know it. What it is about, since I will not let a character say so: competence at the edge of what machinery can do. A scale that has not noticed us. What love has to become to fit through a very small channel. The drills are real. The chemistry is real. The law is real. The lake, the station and the people are not, and nothing invented in it is something you could check and catch. Somebody has to decide what the last message says. I have told you everything else.