These single-topic standalone books explore a central theme through the lens of diverse worlds and civilizations drawn from the Songs of the Universe trilogy. Expanding beyond a single setting, they weave together the experiences of different races and other evolving intelligences across the cosmos—each shaped by their environments, struggles, and ways of knowing. Through these interconnected perspectives, the series examines universal human questions—identity, belonging, survival, and transcendence—revealing how distinct forms of life, across different worlds, arrive at deeper awareness through challenge, adaptation, and connection.
A world of endless oceans. Two civilizations divided by truth. One planet awakening.
On the ocean planet Thaloria, life has evolved in harmony with powerful tides, living reefs, and celestial rhythms shaped by three moons and two suns. For thousands of years, two civilizations have protected their world in very different ways. The Holdfasts rely on engineering, structure, and technology to stabilize an unpredictable planet, while the Weave preserves ancient traditions that allow them to sense the subtle living patterns of the sea itself. Each believes the other has forgotten the true path to survival.
When the planet begins changing in ways neither side can explain, storms intensify, tides become unstable, and once-predictable ecosystems begin transforming before their eyes. Ancient migration routes shift, communication networks fail, and generations of certainty begin to unravel. As environmental crises spread across the archipelagos, old rivalries threaten to become more dangerous than the changes themselves.
Into this growing conflict arrives Kiri, a peaceful envoy from an ancient interstellar alliance dedicated not to ruling younger civilizations, but to helping them discover their own understanding. Rather than offering technology or easy answers, Kiri encourages the divided peoples of Thaloria to see beyond centuries of mistrust and recognize that neither science nor tradition alone can explain what is happening.
As engineer Soren Ashkar uncovers forgotten records hidden beneath his people’s oldest strongholds and reef-sensor Mira Thalen discovers that the living ocean is responding to changes on a planetary scale, both begin realizing that the world they thought they understood has always been larger, older, and more interconnected than they imagined.
Grounded in modern ecology, systems science, astronomy, and marine biology, Fractured Planet explores how civilizations respond when long-held assumptions fail. Rather than focusing on war or conquest, the novel examines cooperation, resilience, environmental stewardship, and the difficult process of learning from opposing perspectives. The result is a hopeful vision of first contact where the greatest challenge is not defeating an enemy, but rediscovering humanity’s—or any civilization’s—place within a living world.
Perfect for readers who enjoy Kim Stanley Robinson, Ursula K. Le Guin, Becky Chambers, Adrian Tchaikovsky, and Sue Burke, Fractured Planet combines scientifically grounded worldbuilding with lyrical prose, unforgettable alien ecosystems, and deeply human characters confronting questions of identity, transformation, and coexistence.
Rich with immersive worldbuilding, ecological realism, and philosophical depth, Fractured Planet is an inspiring work of literary science fiction that asks one timeless question: What if survival depends not on returning the world to what it once was, but on learning how to transform together?
A World Between Two Suns
The stars, moons, and celestial forces that shape an ocean world.
The Thalorian System is centered on Solara, a Sun-like G-type star that provides the light and energy sustaining life on the ocean world of Thaloria. Unlike a circumbinary planet, Thaloria follows a stable S-type orbit around Solara alone, while the smaller red dwarf Eryth travels in a long, eccentric orbit around the shared Solara–Eryth barycenter. Three moons—Aru, Keth, and Veyra—circle Thaloria, together shaping its tides, ocean circulation, and atmosphere.
The interaction of these stars and moons creates three independent astronomical cycles that define the rhythms of the planet. Most years these cycles occur separately, but on rare occasions they overlap, producing profound planetary changes remembered throughout Thalorian history as the Great Sundering.
Harmonic Tide
Approximately once each Thalorian year, the three moons enter a predictable orbital resonance known as the Harmonic Tide. Their combined gravitational influence strengthens tides, intensifies ocean circulation, and synchronizes ecological events across the archipelagos.
For most Thalori, the Harmonic Tide is a season of renewal. Reef organisms spawn, migrations reach their peak, nutrient-rich currents sweep across the oceans, and marine ecosystems become exceptionally productive. Civilizations have planned agriculture, navigation, and festivals around this dependable celestial rhythm for thousands of years.
Eryth’s Periastron
Every one hundred Thalorian years, the red dwarf Eryth reaches periastron—its closest approach to Solara during its highly eccentric orbit. Although Eryth contributes relatively little light, its changing gravitational influence subtly alters Thaloria’s orbital environment.
During periastron, ocean circulation patterns shift, atmospheric circulation becomes more energetic, and weather systems grow increasingly variable. The effects unfold gradually over months rather than days, placing additional stress on ecosystems already adapted to the annual Harmonic Tide.
Eryth’s Magnetic-Activity Cycle
Independent of its orbital motion, Eryth experiences a magnetic activity cycle lasting approximately 21 years, similar in principle to the Sun’s eleven-year solar cycle. But unlike the Sun, Eryth is a red dwarf flare star. Although much smaller and dimmer, red dwarfs possess exceptionally strong magnetic fields capable of storing enormous amounts of energy. When those magnetic fields suddenly reconnect, they unleash intense stellar flares and powerful coronal mass ejections that can be proportionally far more energetic than those produced by Sun-like stars.
During each magnetic maximum, these eruptions become more frequent and more powerful. Most pass harmlessly through the system, but the largest storms can bathe Thaloria in brilliant auroras, disrupt communications and navigation systems, alter the upper atmosphere, and expose ecosystems to brief periods of elevated radiation. While Solara provides the steady energy that sustains life, Eryth periodically reminds the planet that even a small star can profoundly influence an entire world.
The Great Sundering
Only rarely do the three cycles coincide. When the Harmonic Tide, Eryth’s periastron, and Eryth’s magnetic maximum occur together, their combined influences amplify one another, creating a period known as the Great Sundering.
Planetary tides become unusually powerful, ocean currents reorganize, storms intensify, and ecosystems begin adapting to new environmental conditions. The Great Sundering does not destroy Thaloria—it transforms it. Throughout history, these rare convergences have reshaped coastlines, altered migrations, challenged civilizations, and reminded the Thalori that their world is not static, but a living planet continually evolving beneath the dance of its stars and moons.
The Living Biosphere
Discover the extraordinary ecosystems and species of Thaloria.
A Living Ocean
Thaloria is an ocean world where life has evolved not as isolated species competing for survival, but as an interconnected planetary network. From towering kelp forests and living coral reefs to immense ocean wanderers and drifting colonial organisms, every species contributes to the health of the whole. Ocean currents transport nutrients, larvae, oxygen, and chemical signals between the seven archipelagos, weaving together a biosphere in which the boundaries between organism, ecosystem, and planet are often impossible to distinguish. Throughout the novel, the central realization is that Thaloria’s greatest strength lies not in individual species, but in the relationships that connect them.
Iconic Marine Life
The foundation of Thaloria’s biosphere is its extraordinary marine flora. Vast Tideveil Kelp forests, rising more than sixty meters from volcanic shelves, create underwater canopies that shelter countless species while stabilizing sediments, oxygenating surrounding waters, and softening the immense tidal forces generated by the planet’s three moons. Living reef ecosystems are built from giant Cathedral Fans, ancient Crimson Shelf Corals, glowing Lantern Pods, nutrient-rich Thread Moss, and graceful meadows of Whisper Grass, each species helping regulate currents, recycle nutrients, or create habitat for hundreds of others. Together they form immense living landscapes that are continually reshaped by the changing sea.
Sharing the oceans with them are elegant Veilray Gliders, which drift effortlessly through pressure gradients on vast translucent fins; schools of swift Tide Runners, one of Thaloria’s primary grazing species; towering colonial Sky Sails that float between sea and sky harvesting sunlight and plankton; glowing Halo Salps, Dream Bells, and other colonial organisms that illuminate the oceans with spectacular displays of bioluminescence. Smaller species—including Echo Shrimp, Coral Weavers, and Kelp Hares—play equally vital ecological roles, maintaining reefs, recycling nutrients, and accelerating recovery after storms.
The most celebrated inhabitants of Thaloria are the Nerai, immense cetacean-like beings whose migrations synchronize with the annual Harmonic Tide. Their haunting songs reflect changes in temperature, pressure, salinity, magnetism, and tidal forces across the planet, making them living indicators of the health of the entire planetary system. Both the Weave and the Holdfasts study their harmonies, although each understands only part of what the Nerai reveal.
A Planet That Adapts
Unlike many fictional worlds, Thaloria’s ecosystems are never static. Species continually shift their distributions in response to changing currents, temperatures, and tides. Coral colonies establish new reefs while older ones decline. Tideveil forests migrate toward newly favorable waters. Veilray Gliders abandon traditional nursery grounds without hesitation, and the Nerai alter migration routes as the planet itself changes. Throughout Fractured Planet, the biosphere demonstrates a remarkable capacity to reorganize and adapt, revealing that evolution is not a response to catastrophe but an ongoing expression of life on a living world.
The Living Planet
To the Weave, every organism participates in an ancient living relationship; to the Holdfasts, each species is part of a complex ecological system that can be observed and understood through science. Both perspectives prove essential. Together they reveal Thaloria’s greatest truth: the planet is not simply inhabited by life—it functions as a single, interconnected biosphere whose resilience emerges from countless relationships among species, oceans, atmosphere, and the celestial rhythms of the stars and moons. As the Great Sundering approaches, the biosphere does not collapse. It transforms, reminding its people that survival has never meant resisting change, but learning to change together.
The Thalori & the Seven Archipelagos
Explore the cultures, history, and civilizations of the island world.
The seven great archipelagos of Thaloria are bound together by immense planetary currents that circulate through the Central Expanse, where powerful ocean gyres converge before branching into dozens of fast-moving Tideways. These natural marine highways transport heat, nutrients, migrating life, trade, travelers, and culture across thousands of kilometers of open ocean, making them the lifeblood of civilization. Each archipelago has developed its own identity while remaining deeply dependent on every other through this living network.
Together, these seven archipelagos form a single interconnected civilization. The Holdfasts provide the engineering, navigation, and infrastructure that keep the Tideways open, while the Weave stewards the reefs and living systems that sustain the ocean itself. Mixed communities bridge both traditions, ensuring that no island stands alone and no current is ever truly isolated. On Thaloria, every voyage, every harvest, and every community ultimately depends upon the health of the Central Expanse and the powerful currents that unite the world.
For centuries, the people of Thaloria have been united by the oceans that sustain them while divided by two very different ways of understanding how to protect them.
The Holdfasts are engineers, navigators, and builders. They believe civilization survives through knowledge made permanent—harbors, Tideways, storm barriers, navigation systems, and the institutions that preserve hard-won experience across generations. They value structure, planning, and reliability, convinced that without strong foundations the scattered islands would become isolated worlds vulnerable to the sea’s immense power. Their achievements have connected the seven archipelagos into a thriving civilization, enabling trade, medicine, communication, and cooperation across thousands of kilometers of open ocean.
The Weave are reefkeepers, healers, and stewards of the living world. They believe survival comes not from controlling nature, but from understanding and adapting to it. Through generations of close observation, ecological knowledge, and deep connection with Thaloria’s reefs, currents, and marine life, they have learned to recognize subtle changes long before they become crises. They value resilience, relationships, and the wisdom of living systems, understanding that the ocean is never static but constantly changing.
Neither civilization is wrong. The Holdfasts preserve what civilization has learned. The Weave preserve how life continues to adapt.
But over centuries, each has gradually forgotten how much it once depended upon the other. Suspicion replaces cooperation. Each sees the other’s greatest strength as its greatest weakness. As strange environmental changes spread across the planet and the once-predictable Harmonic Tide begins behaving in unprecedented ways, the divide deepens. Engineers blame failing ecosystems. Reefkeepers blame rigid infrastructure. While each side struggles to defend what it values most, Thaloria itself is changing in ways neither philosophy can fully explain.
As the crisis grows, forgotten fragments of an older history begin to emerge—evidence that the ancestors of both civilizations once shared a far more complete understanding of their world. Before the Holdfasts and the Weave became separate traditions, they worked together as complementary guardians of a single living planet, recognizing that structure and adaptation were never opposing forces, but inseparable parts of the same whole.
At its heart, Kiri: Fractured Planet asks a timeless question: Can people who have inherited only half the truth learn to become whole again? As rising seas, changing currents, and an ancient planetary cycle threaten everything they have built, the Holdfasts and the Weave must rediscover their common heritage and recognize that neither civilization possesses the complete answer alone. Only by bringing together the strengths each has spent generations protecting can they hope to understand what Thaloria is becoming—and ensure that both their world and their civilization survive the transformation.
The Nature of Conflict
This illustration represents the central philosophical idea of Fractured Planet: that the Holdfasts and the Weave are not opposing civilizations so much as complementary halves of a larger whole. Each preserves an essential truth, yet each mistakes that partial truth for the complete one. Their conflict is therefore not simply political or cultural—it is the visible consequence of a deeper fragmentation in how they understand themselves, one another, and the living planet they inhabit.
The visual is inspired by Arthur Koestler’s concept of the holon, in which every system is simultaneously a whole in itself and part of a larger whole, together with Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory, which argues that individuals, societies, and cultures evolve through increasingly inclusive stages of consciousness. Integral Theory suggests that conflict often arises when groups operating from different worldviews each defend legitimate but incomplete truths. Growth occurs not by defeating one perspective with another, but by transcending and including them within a broader understanding. These ideas form one of the philosophical foundations of the novel.
In Fractured Planet, the Holdfasts embody structure, engineering, prediction, and stability. The Weave embodies relationship, adaptation, ecological awareness, and lived experience. Both arose as adaptive responses to different environments, and neither is wrong. Their ancestors, the Selkai, understood that civilization required both ways of knowing working together. Over centuries that integrated inheritance fractured into separate traditions, leaving each society convinced that its own perspective represented the whole truth.
The image therefore symbolizes far more than a fictional conflict. It reflects many of the growing divisions visible on Earth today: science and spirituality, technology and ecology, economy and environment, tradition and change, certainty and curiosity. As societies become increasingly polarized, each side often recognizes genuine problems while overlooking the insights held by the other. The result is a narrowing of perspective precisely when global challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss, resource depletion, and social fragmentation require more integrated ways of thinking.
Ultimately, the illustration expresses the novel’s central message: a civilization remains whole only when the relationships that sustain it remain whole. Neither engineering without ecological wisdom, nor ecological awareness without coordinated action, is sufficient. Lasting resilience emerges only when seemingly opposing perspectives are recognized as complementary expressions of a larger living system—whether that system is Thaloria or our own planet Earth.
DIG DEEPER on my Blog: Fractured Worlds: What Science Fiction Can Teach Us About Our Deepest Divisions