The Second Fork

From the editors

A hereditary keeper watches a bright new world switch itself off

Ilen is thirty-eight and the thirty-eighth of her line to wear the cord that holds a mended star-chart. For two hundred and fourteen years her family has kept faith on the world of Declan. Now the Concern's Lamplight runs the valley of Meret by its own tables, and Ilen distrusts a beauty no one seems to have paid for.

The prose has a patient, old-fashioned cadence, full of watches, hearths and standing stones. Small details carry weight: the keeper's school still meets outdoors, and Ilen has twice refused a heated room without being able to explain why. Later scenes widen to crowds by a river and voices that question what progress costs.

This continues an earlier series, and a recap page sums up what came before. It suits patient readers who enjoy reflective, character-led science fiction about memory and duty.

Perfect for: Readers of reflective, literary SF · Fans of multi-generation sagas · Long winter evenings

What’s inside

1. Previously in The Corporation
2. The Hearth
3. What the Soil Remembers
4. The First Sitting
5. The Concern
6. The Hull
7. The Pyramid at Meret
8. Why the Ancients Buried Me
9. The Hay-Barn
10. The Watchman’s House
11. The Council of the Lamp
12. The Unlocked Room
13. Supper at the Hearth
14. The Surveyors
15. The Knot-Keepers
16. The Clinic
17. Their Own Legs
18. What I Borrowed
19. The Old Books
20. The Ledger
21. Tavo’s Dilemma
22. The Corridor
23. The Small Resonance
24. Three Voices
25. The Descent
26. The Taking Road
27. The Draw
28. Why
29. The Reading
30. The Charge
31. The Reckoning
32. The Narrows
33. Snow
34. The High Villages
35. The Barn at Linton
36. The Cold Room
37. Two Days
38. The Width of the Wound
39. What Will You Send
40. What I Carry
41. Read. Kept.
42. The First Asking
43. The Jar
44. The Standing-Stone
45. Picture Credits

Read the opening

In October 1998, two young Cambridge men, John Declan and Marcus Noakes, felt a cold draught in the hall of Peterhouse and followed it down thirty-one steps to a sealed door bearing the arms of King John and the seal of the Templars. Behind it lay a chest that gathered no dust: star-charts, blueprints, a book in a script no one living could read, and a living alien intelligence in a vessel of green light, which the carving called Qui servitur—He who is served. They carried it to a barn at Linton, with Susan Reyes, who knew the sign at the chest’s foot for the Hopi Prophecy Rock, and with three others; and in that barn they chose, against Susan’s warning, not to bury it again but to build on it. From that choice came Starscape, a cheap, dense, world-changing power, and a corporation of forty thousand people; and from the Book came the plans for a ring, the X1-V, and the ampules that were not fuel but seed. In 2012, in a mountain in Colorado, with the Monroe Foundation, the first ampule was opened. It did not open a door; it cut a wound. The weather broke, the nations failed, and the thing the founders had called a pilot was revealed as a captain wearing the ship as a body. Two thousand people—chosen not for virtue but because their patterns would hold—were carried out of a burning Earth in the Gemini 1, among them John and Susan, who the world had been told was dead; Marcus; Evelyn Monroe; General Cody; and Mihai Cuza, the man who had hunted the ship and learned that he had been hunted. vii

The sample pages on this site continue the opening — and the full book is available in print.