A Dubious Hope and Thwarted

Fear can be a self-fulfilling prophesy.

A DUBIOUS HOPE

RELEASING NOVEMBER 14, 2025

A tight-knit communal society of Spacers has evolved aboard the generation ship New Hope seven hundred years after its launch from Earth. When a pulsar fries their destination planet, scientists hide the information to prevent panic.

They can’t hide it from the telepathic aliens who have hitched a ride. The alien Semqu wrench the entire ship and all its occupants into orbit around a gorgeous, habitable planet: Trye.

Teenaged Opal emerges from an epileptic-like panic attack with a presence in her mind, which eventually convinces her that it is one of the powerful aliens. She has been chosen as a Voice, a Semqu translator.

Opal grows to trust these mysterious benefactors, who provide her ship-born people with a bridge to planetary life.

Danielle is a soldier with secret orders to protect the mission from political sabotage. She wakes from her long hibernation with sensory issues and emotional discombobulation. This culture has evolved in ways she can’t accept. The long journey has created a communal society of polyglots who’ve renamed themselves Spacers and pride themselves as being free of the negative traits of their ancestor humans. Planetary life’s pressures rattle that unity, and Spacers are distracted by their new neighbors: burrowing grizzly-sized “tardigrades,” space-faring “cuttlefish” in massive, clanking mech-like spacesuits, and egotistical furry dinos.

Spacer scientists are bewildered by the how of New Hope’s transport. Danielle wants to know why. She doesn’t believe Opal’s naive answers; the Semqu have to want something from them for this gift.

Trye is a rich planet. Someone else has to want it.

And in fact, someone very much does.

THWARTED

coming in 2026

As events hurl her new home toward cataclysm, Opal must protect and guide a young powerful Semqu to maturity. Together they must choose who to save, what to protect. Along the way Opal rediscovers her own fiercely held values:

Resilience.

Service.

Commitment.

Community.

Yet both love and a long-simmering desire for vengeance will play into the only choice she’s made entirely on her own for decades: if she wants to live forever.

A Dubious Hope, releasing Nov. 14, 2025. Thwarted, coming in 2026.

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