In the age after fabrication, the line between what is made and what is real has not been crossed — it has dissolved. Someone is about to discover what remains beneath.
The Great Fabrication Age is not a series with a fixed endpoint. It is a world — and the books set within it are independent stories sharing that world, its history, and the long shadow of what happened when someone tried to make its suppressed truth undeniable. Each book stands alone. No reading order required.
Four books are in various stages of development, spanning the Open's caravan country, the Arctic shipping lanes, a Vermont ridge community above an expanded Lake Champlain, the canals and workshops of Venice, and the broken interior roads of a world still working out what it lost.
Wakes & Shadows is complete and in editorial development. The others are in various stages of outline and drafting.
"It sounds like something that has been waiting for a very long time. And it sounds like it just decided the wait was over."Wakes & Shadows, Ch. 1 — Sable
When a civilization can manufacture history, identity, and memory at scale, what does it mean for anything to be real? The books press this question without offering easy resolution.
Who controls what is remembered controls what is true. The institutions of the Fabrication Age are not sinister in obvious ways — they are bureaucratic, plausible, deeply invested in their own legitimacy.
A clock wound by its maker carries something a replicated clock does not. What, exactly? Every book in the universe takes this question seriously as theology, aesthetics, and ethics at once.
Each book is about someone carrying something they didn't choose — a signal, a craft, a route, a grief — to the next person who needs it. The series is, at its root, about what it means to carry what cannot be owned.
Not a utopia story. Not a dystopia story. A story set inside the long, strange aftermath of a civilization that solved most of its material problems and created entirely new spiritual ones.
Running beneath every book is a question about what it means to keep something alive when everything around you says let it go. The answer is never simple and always costly.
David is a writer based in northern Vermont. His background spans medieval history, materials science, and the kind of hands-on engineering work that teaches you more about how things are made than any classroom can. He has been building things — physical and textual — for most of his adult life.
Wakes & Shadows is his first novel. It took the interests of a decade — authenticity, craft, power, the archaeology of meaning — and gave them a place to live. The Great Fabrication Age universe has room for many more.
He is currently in editorial development, working toward representation and traditional publication. The newsletter is the best way to follow that journey.