The Signal Cycle
I wrote a story that begins on the worst morning in human history, and then asks a harder question than whether we survive it.
If Echoes of Liberty is me arguing about what a country owes its people, The Signal Cycle is me asking what a species owes anybody at all. Same worry. Bigger room.
I’ll admit one more thing. Somewhere under these books is a parable I’ve never stopped thinking about — a man in a ditch, several people with perfectly good reasons to keep walking, and one who stopped.
I didn’t set out to write it. It kept showing up anyway.
THE INTERVENTION PROTOCOL — Book One
History was supposed to end that morning. The missiles were in the air, and seven seconds before the first detonation, every one of them stopped. Not shot down. Stopped.
What follows isn’t first contact. It’s a protocol — and the discovery that we were never as alone, or as unobserved, as we believed. Something old is moving in the deep dark. A boundary is shifting toward us. And a world that only yesterday learned how to destroy itself has to face a worse possibility: that survival was never the destination. It was the entrance exam.
The Last Garden — Book Two
The Compact is coming. It does not negotiate. It concludes.
Allison Miller has been chosen to speak for all of us — to carry the story of our species into the presence of intelligences older than human history. What she learns is that testimony is not a defense, and survival is not proof of worth.
A broken bell carefully mended. A garden planted for someone who may never see it bloom. A kindness offered where no reward is possible. When everything useful has been counted, what remains is what we actually are.
Two Die Four — Book One of the Two Die Four Series
I love fantasy. I love old mysteries, impossible places, friendships forged under extraordinary circumstances, and that wonderful question at the heart of every adventure: What if?
So I wrote one.
Two Die Four begins in 1982 with a group of college friends, a tabletop fantasy game, and a four-sided die that begins doing something it shouldn’t be able to do.
Then a door opens.
What follows is an adventure about friendship, courage, discovery, belonging—and a place called the Always that may have been waiting for them much longer than they realize.
It is very different from what I write here. And yet, in some ways, it isn’t.
Beneath the fantasy are many of the same things I find myself writing about at Echoes: who we become when we’re tested, what we owe one another, whether ordinary people can make a difference, and the strange power of love, loyalty and friendship.
There are also monsters, magic, impossible doors, a rather important four-sided die—and two dogs who may know considerably more than they’re letting on.
These books mean a great deal to me.
So if you’ve enjoyed the words I’ve shared with you here, I’d be honored if you’d give this other side of my writing a try.
Maybe you’ll find something of yourself in the Always, too.
