Chiku Yellow is earthbound: living a peaceful life on a changing world as humanity explores a thousand new ways to experience life.

Chiku Red is space-bound: blasted into deep space to investigate Eunice Akinya’s last journey, and maybe discover the final secrets of space travel.

Chiku Green is planet-bound: travelling thousands of lightyears to the planet Crucible. A new home for humankind; it’s a habitable planet hosting a fascinating alien labyrinth.

All three are Chiku Akinya.

All three are pivotal to our future in space.

All three are in danger…

 

This is the second volume of my Poseidon’s Children sequence. The entire thing traces the emergence of humanity as a spacefaring civilisation, across many centuries, from the loose perspective of the Akinya family, the descendents of the 21st Century space explorer Eunice Akinya. It deals with the tensions between organic and robotic intelligences, the fracturing of humanity into different genetic lineages, and – ultimately – contact with the alien.

 

The first book, Blue Remembered Earth, follows two of Eunice’s grandchildren – Geoffrey and Sunday – as they attempt to unravel a mystery surrounding their recently deceased relative. The resolution to this puzzle takes the siblings across the solar system, and along the way they find out about an anomaly detected on a planet around another star. By the end of the first book, the scene is set for the expansion of humanity into interstellar space.

 

Orion commissioned a video trailer for the book. It’s very well done, and exactly captures my mental image of Geoffrey and his immersion in a fully augmented 22nd Century, in which the Moon has been colonised.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIbf2RcSgDA

 

On the Steel Breeze moves the action forward about 200 years. The protagonist now is Chiku, the daughter of Sunday. That’s where it gets complicated, though, as Chiku – thanks to an advanced cloning/implant technology – actually shares three bodies with herself. We follow the Chikus – helpfully colour coded – as they get caught up in the machinations surrounding the first expedition to an extrasolar planet – which also happens to be the planet with the alien anomaly on it.

 

I am now working on the third volume, title still to be confirmed.