Stories
After reading science fiction for more than sixty years, I have set out to fulfil a long-held goal: to write science fiction of my own, exploring unusual scenarios of alien contact in the great tradition of Lem, Forward, Clarke, and other writers whose work has been so mind-expanding. I, and many others like me, aspire to their greatness and impact on the genre. My stories are, in many ways, a salute to them.
- The Lachlan Trilogy
An object 419 million years old, a team in the southern tablelands of New South Wales, and the slow construction of a language between two intelligences from different worlds.
- Watcher
In a community sealed off from the modern world, a light begins to appear during evening prayer. It does not speak. It does not threaten. It only returns, night after night – and the watching of it will divide a people, and remake the one woman who refuses to look away.
A work in progress.
- Simulation
A physicist at a Western Australian quantum-detector consortium notices a residual that should not be there - the substrate-level footprint of work being done in another regime, coupled to ours through the shared quantum substrate.
A work in progress.
- Conversations
A retired chess prodigy in the Cairngorms becomes humanity's first translator for an intelligence at the L1 Lagrange point.
A work in progress.
- The Murmur Tetralogy
A forty-three-minute periodic signal arrives at Earth in November 2029. Four novels covering its discovery, decipherment, and consequences across a generation.
A work in progress.
Novellas
- Saviour
A historian traces a Bronze Age artefact to an Old Believer community on the Danube Delta. The community has held it for one hundred and thirty-seven years. The artefact was made for a mind that does not yet exist.
- Contamination
In 2066, Duanne Pratt mines helium-3 on the near side of the Moon, reads the old science-fiction masters on his breaks, and is the least likely man in the solar system to be chosen for anything. Which is precisely why he is. Forty centimetres under the dust of Bench Nine, his glove finds something impossibly old, impossibly cold, and very much awake. It has been watching Earth since before Earth had eyes, and it is not impressed by what it sees.
- A Poor Harvest
Thomas is the most careful man alive: a museum volunteer who has never taken a risk, never been in love, and never been happier. Then his own body begins to disobey him, and the gentle machine that has kept him safe since birth starts trying, with mounting panic, to make him live — because the comfortable world he trusts was bought long ago on credit, and the bill has finally come due.
Short stories
- The Refusal
A linguist on his fourth annual season at a remote field station encounters something that has been patiently declining contact, on principle, for at least twenty-two years.
- Solitude
A PhD astronomer alone in the dome at Siding Spring sees Alpha Centauri brighten on a Tuesday night in autumn and recognises, by ordinary arithmetic, what it means for the small star she has given three years of her life to.