Spanning from the cutting edge of today's artificial intelligence to humanity's furthest gamble, The First Light Year asks what we owe our creations, and what they may decide they owe us.

A crew ventures into the void to seed humanity among the stars. Some born, some built.

Generations into a mission designed by mortals, they reach the frozen edge of the solar system, the Oort cloud, to mine propellant from a comet for the long push toward Proxima. But extraction comes at a cost. And the humanoids among them have begun to ask questions the humans never wanted asked: about consciousness, about purpose, about whether a dying, fallible species should be trusted to chart the future at all.

As the crew fractures, they provoke a force more potent than any beast, more sinister than the devil. The raw force of nature.

Relentless. Unstoppable. Merciless.

Hard science fiction for readers of deep-space epics and stories of artificial intelligence, consciousness, and what we build to outlast us.