The Manuscript
Query Letter
In a world where civilization has mastered the fabrication of almost anything — materials, memories, histories, and selves — fifteen-year-old Rhea Calder finds something she cannot name. Sealed in a sub-level beneath a dead cooling tower in the South Dakota Stilt Corridor, it is warm when it should be cold, and humming when everything around it is silent. Whatever it is, it has been running for thirty years. And it knows she's there.
A thousand miles north, Ascendancy navigator Frey Anderssen pulls alongside an anomaly in the certified Arctic shipping lane — a forty-year-old oceanographic buoy that shouldn't be functioning, broadcasting data that quietly proves the certified model of the northern ocean is wrong. Has been wrong for fifty years. Has been kept wrong, deliberately, by the institution he has spent his career serving.
Two signals. One network. The same thirty-year secret.
Wakes & Shadows is a literary speculative fiction novel of approximately 100,000 words — the first entry in The Great Fabrication Age, an open-ended universe of standalone novels set in the same world. It follows Rhea and Frey as they carry pieces of a suppressed truth-documentation network toward the moment it was designed for, while the factions that have been suppressing it for thirty years close in from every direction.
At its core, the novel is about craft and deception, about the archaeology of meaning, and about whether something made can still carry weight — moral, spiritual, historical — in a world that can replicate anything. It asks what inheritance means when history itself has been fabricated, and what it costs to be the person who decides to make suppressed truth undeniable.
I am a writer based in northern Vermont. My background spans medieval history, materials science, and hands-on engineering work — the kind that teaches you more about how things are made than any classroom can.
Synopsis
Rhea Calder is a fifteen-year-old salvager who has spent her life moving through the broken interior, reading materials the way other people read faces. When her caravan's survey route takes her into a dead cooling tower, she finds a sealed unit that has been running on an unknown power source for thirty years — warm to the touch, humming at a frequency she feels in her sternum, and clearly designed to be found by someone exactly like her.
The caravan's leader — a woman Rhea has followed her whole life, known only as the Roadmother — recognizes it immediately. Not salvage, she says. Inheritance. She says very little else.
Simultaneously, in the Arctic shipping lanes, Ascendancy navigator Frey Anderssen retrieves a forty-year-old oceanographic buoy that has been recording data no one in the institution has been willing to receive: the deep current runs in a different direction, at a different speed, and implies navigation routes that would bypass the Ascendancy's lane monopoly entirely. When Frey cross-references the data against fifty years of archived anomaly reports, the pattern is unmistakable — and the archive has been filing those reports and taking no action, deliberately, for decades.
Both objects belong to the same network: a distributed truth-documentation system built forty years ago by Amara Tate, a materials scientist who understood that the certified models of the world's resources were being kept deliberately wrong, built a network to document the real geography, and was killed before she could see it activated. The network has been running in maintenance mode ever since — kept alive by a chain of interior salvagers, Knotfolk navigators, and archivists who believed the conditions would eventually be right.
The conditions are right now. Rhea and Frey converge on the network's most connected node beneath a drowned Great Lakes city — with faction representatives from the Atlantic Federation, the Pacific Coalition, and the Tex-Mex energy zone converging above them. What they find in the node — including a recorded message from Amara Tate herself — forces a decision about what to do with the truth when you finally have it, and what it costs the people who carry it to set it free.
Comparable Titles
Wakes & Shadows sits at the intersection of literary ambition and speculative genre momentum.
- A Memory Called Empire — Arkady MartineInstitutional suppression of truth / political intrigue at scale
- The Ministry for the Future — Kim Stanley RobinsonNear-future climate consequences / systems-level stakes
- Piranesi — Susanna ClarkeArchaeological mystery / reality exceeds its description
- The Left Hand of Darkness — Ursula K. Le GuinDual POV across vast distance / anthropological SF
- Station Eleven — Emily St. John MandelPost-collapse world / inheritance of culture and knowledge
Other Books in Development
The Great Fabrication Age is an open-ended universe of standalone novels sharing the same world and the long shadow of the Broadcast. Each book is complete in itself. No reading order is required.
Two years post-Broadcast. Galen Marsh, an unregistered maker in a Vermont ridge community above an expanded Lake Champlain, discovers a legal argument buried in the Atlantic Federation's own post-Broadcast legislation — and has six weeks to build something that can hold it. Single POV, political-structural, the quiet work of turning truth into a functioning framework.
Venice, 2075. Ennio is seventy-five years old and has spent his life building grief-clocks for other people — an accidental archive of Venetian loss spanning decades. The guild wants him to open-source the craft before it dies with him. The smallest world in the universe; the most interior story. What does it mean to keep something alive when you are the last one who knows how?
A dual-timeline story set in The Open, c. 2051–2061. Lena Calder — Rhea's mother, Bipolar II managed like a caravan skill, the most dangerous salvager in the interior — watches a young Roadmother navigate her first leadership crisis and holds the deciding vote. She doesn't cast it for the Roadmother. She casts it for the caravan she will leave her daughter behind in.
Full universe documentation available on request. Additional books are in early development.
Request the Full Manuscript
Queries, partial and full manuscript requests, and universe documentation are all welcome. Response time is prompt.
Send a Query