Evening's Empires

The True Empire has fallen. While Earth endures a centuries-long winter, the rest of the Solar System is divided in thousand city states and petty commonwealths and kingdoms.

Scientific enquiry has dwindled. Superstition drives out reason. When a mysterious signal stamps the same brief vision in the minds of everyone alive, rival cultists claim that it foreshadows a holy Utopia, or the intrusion of something inhuman, and a final war between good and evil.

Gajananvihari Pilot, youngest son of a family of junk peddlers, escapes the hijack of his father’s ship with vital secrets locked inside the severed head of a philosopher. Sworn to find the bandits who murdered his family, he quickly discovers that his search is linked to the key to understanding the Bright Moment.

Accompanied by a flamboyant exile and the daughter of a mad scientist, pursued by cultists and renegades, he sets out on a quest across an asteroid belt crammed with the wonders and ruins of a more ambitious age. From encounters with ancient intelligences both human and artificial to a reckoning with the deep rivalries within his family and a secret rooted in the first days of the colonisation of the Solar System, Pilot’s journey may decide the answer to the most pressing question facing humanity.

Something new has flowered in the ruins of history.
Who will decide how it grows?