Black Dawn

This sequel to Inversion forces a pacifist society in a pastoral, isolated universe to wrestle with the cost of self-defense. The people of Germinal live on a tiny, verdant planet where evolution has traced a slightly different path. For centuries, they have peacefully coexisted amid an ecosystem where an advancing wall of fire consumes all in its path, a perpetual cycle of destruction and renewal. That is, until everything they knew of their history was violently upended by the arrival of colonizers.

Sixty million miles from Earth, in the orbiting city of Station Six, work still sucks. Max is a dockyard worker (with an illegal sideline in hacking and cybersurgery) in the company town of the future. When the LMC Corporation announces its Automated Future Plan, which will turn Station Six into a vacation destination with as few human personnel as needed to stay functional, Max has had enough. Max and their fellow workers rise from their complacency and join forces with an underground revolutionary cell as all hell breaks loose.

Dimos Horacki is a Borolian journalist and a cynical patriot, his muckraking days behind him. But when his newspaper ships him to the front, he’s embedded in the Imperial Army and the reality of colonial expansion is laid bare before him. His adventures take him from villages and homesteads to the great refugee city of Hronople, built of glass, steel, and stone, all while a war rages around him. The empire fights for coal and iron, but the anarchists of Hron fight for their way of life.

On a mysterious green planet regenerated by fire, vibrant communities live in harmony with both its strange ecosystem and each other—until the day imperialist forces arrive. Char and her family are among the nomadic Summer people of Germinal who tend to the rich biodiversity of their world through reciprocity and ritual. They must forever travel to stay ahead of the walls of fire that approach like clockwork, bringing with them both loss and renewal.