I've written a novel
This morning I ordered ten printed copies of Pioneer. They're not the finished book. They say Draft 3.1 on the back and Not for Sale, and they're going to a few friends, some family, and a couple of people I trust to tell me what doesn't work.
I haven't mentioned this here before, mostly because I wasn't sure it would get finished. It has. It's called Pioneer, and this morning I ordered the first ten printed copies.
What it's about
Frank Bell spent nine years on the engine that took the first crews to Mars. Then the Panel turned down his next idea, and he retreated to a workshop on an industrial estate with a kettle, a schoolroom robot called Dave and an AI called Scarlett. There, out of a second-hand delivery drone, he built a faster-than-light drive.
On Thursday, a fifteen-kilometre asteroid will pass closer to Earth than some of our satellites. With every telescope in the world pointed at it, Frank is going to launch into the middle of the broadcast and prove he was right.
It's funny, I hope, and sad in places, and the science is as real as I could make it. Where I've bent the physics, I've owned up to it in a note at the back.
Where it came from
Pioneer started life as a film. I wrote the soundtrack first, back in 2023, and a lot of what ends up in Frank's cockpit is already sitting on the shelves in my workshop. Somewhere along the way the story needed more room than a film would give it, so the book came first.
What happens next
The copies arrive on 4 November. They aren't the finished book. They say Draft 3.1 and Not for Sale on the back, and they're going to a few friends, some family, and a couple of people I trust to tell me what doesn't work. Each one has a letter inside asking them to be honest and to write in the margins.
The cover is a render I made in Blender: the Earth coming up out of the dark, with the title set very wide. Seeing it wrapped round a proof on Bookvault's screen was the first time it felt like a real book.
Once the notes are in, there'll be another draft, and then the finished thing.
Keep up with it
There's a Pioneer page with the details. Book news goes out on its own newsletter, separate from this one, so if you're here for the bikes you won't get a flood of rocket talk. If you'd like to hear when you can read it, [sign up here].
I'll post again when the box arrives.