For All The Marbles

From the moment you turned the final page on Duality, you knew this battle was coming. And when you turned the final page on The Universe Within, you learned it was coming soon.

This series has, from the beginning, been about saving the universe from destruction at the hands of the Dzhvar. About a tireless endeavor by Mesme to save not merely innumerable lives but existence itself. (Though you can be forgiven for not realizing any of this when you cracked open a little book called Starshine. I did hide the ball for a while.)

As a brief aside: if I could change one thing about Starshine, it would be to put Mesme on the page somewhere. We learn in Vertigo how Mesme was watching all along, but I wish I’d found a way to squeeze them into a scene. Because this is Mesme’s story, at least as much as it is Alex and Caleb’s.

Anyway, where was I? Ah, yes, the Dzhvar. Specifically, the Dzhvar trilogy—or as I like to call it, Shadows & Light.

Book One of Shadows & Light is titled LIMINAL SPACE, and it will be coming your way later this year (you can preorder it here). Here’s the placeholder, very much non-final blurb for the book:

A war has been waged for endless aeons. Our greatest champions fight it again and again across millions of years, in a tireless endeavor to save not merely innumerable lives but existence itself.

It is a war that has never been won. But there has never been a timeline like this one before.

When the Dzhvar, an ancient enemy that once brought the universe to the brink of annihilation, rise from their long slumber to resume feasting on the fabric of space, the battle is again joined.

If Alex Solovy has anything to say about it, for the last time.

Hey, I used some of those same words up above…I guess I’m hammering a theme here, huh? By the way, I’ve already written almost 50K words of Liminal Space. This story wants to be told. ;)

Since I have a bit of a history of over-sharing in these blog posts, I’ll go ahead and tell you the titles of the remaining books as well:

Book Two:
THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING

Book Three:
NAKED SINGULARITY

Let your brain noodle over those titles and what they might foreshadow for a bit. I have draft versions of the covers done as well, but they’re not far enough along for me to share yet.

While I’m here, an important word about Cosmic Shores. I’ve been presenting these novels as “stand-alone adventures” outside the main Amaranthe story arc. With respect to Medusa Falling and The Thief, this is more or less true (though what Marlee, Eren and Nyx experienced in those books will have a real impact on their character arcs in Shadows & Light). The Universe Within, though? It’s not so stand-alone. Blame Alex and Caleb, for they carry this story with them wherever they go. This means the events of The Universe Within directly impact the plot of Liminal Space and the entire trilogy. So if you were skipping this book because it “didn’t matter,” it does. Grab it here.

Now, where was I…again? Ah, yes, the big news. Naked Singularity will be the 25th book in the Amaranthe universe. What a lovely round number that is! A good number with which to tell a proper story, I think.

…which is why it will be the final book in the series.

Alex has opinions

As I said, this has always been the story of saving the universe from annihilation—of creating a boundless future for all life—and Alex certainly intends to do that once and for all. Perhaps more importantly, though, this is the story I envisioned telling when I started working on Starshine—and never in my wildest dreams imagined I would actually get to do so.

But I did have that dream, which is a major reason I was indie from the start and have stayed that way. With the state of modern publishing, there was never a chance a publisher would buy into a 20+ book outline of a fully planned master story arc. It would’ve been all about selling one book—and if that book didn’t perform to expectations, it was game over. This is why a lot of series disappear uncompleted, which I know drives readers crazy. It’s a promise unfulfilled.

With Shadows & Light, Amaranthe will deliver on its promise: to tell an epic, complex, rewarding story that was going somewhere important from the beginning.

And it’s about more than just a final battle against the Dzhvar. These amazing characters have been through so much, have grown so much over the course of these books. Several of them saw lengthy character and relationship arcs draw to beautiful resolutions in Riven Worlds. (I’m looking at you, Mia, Malcolm, Perrin and Joaquim.) Others feel queued up to tackle their end-game boss demons and at last find peace or come into their own. (I’m looking at you, Eren. Marlee? Corradeo? Morgan?) And don’t even get me started on Nika’s journey…but that’s for the books to tell.

The point is, everything is coming together here at the end, exactly as it should. Twenty-five books. Sixty years of stories (going back to Meridian), plus a million years before that. All these roads and all this history leads to Shadows & Light. And I will do everything in my power to make these three books the most amazing, original, memorable and fulfilling conclusion possible.

You may recall that when I announced the Cosmic Shores trilogy, I talked about doing a sequence of short story or novella prequels to explore the million years of Amaranthe history between the (first) Dzhvar War and when humanity arrives. Well, I’ve devised a way to weave the most important of these stories into the Shadows & Light narrative itself, where they will have the biggest impact.

I know some of you are going to be…not pleased…to hear that Amaranthe is coming to an end after this trilogy. You love these characters as much as I do, and if you’re like me, nothing has been more fun than hanging out with them for millions of words. I agree! But as I’ve said many times, I never want my writing to become dull, repetitive or predictable. And I fear that if I were to try to stretch out this story with tacked-on plot devices and ‘just kidding!’ tricks, it would become so.

Does this mean I’ll never again write Alex and Caleb? It seems impossible for this to be true, for they are my heart and soul. But if I do return to Amaranthe at some point in the future, it will be under a different series name and will be a clear, unambiguous fresh start.

Some of you, on the other hand, are pleased with this news. I’ve heard from many of you that you want to see something new and fresh from me. I agree with that, too! Which is why I’ve already plotted out a brand-new trilogy set in a wholly new universe (I swear, I mean it—no Asterion Noir switcheroo this time). New characters, new technology, new bad guys, new history of humanity’s future.

But it’s going to be a while before I get to that story. So, having extracted the ideas out of my head and memorialized them on digital paper, I’ve set the outline aside—truly, way on the other side of the room—and turned my full, undivided attention to Shadows & Light. It’s going to be one hell of a ride, so buckle up.