Science Fiction Novel #2 is In the Can!
I’ve completed the first draft of my second science fiction novel, LANTERN.
I started writing it in December 2023, and over the past two years it grew into something larger and more ambitious than anything I’ve attempted before. At roughly 175,000 words, the full story now exists on the page, from its opening premise to its final consequences. The sandbox is full. A few rough castles are standing. Now comes the work of carving and refinement.
LANTERN is a near-future science fiction novel set in Low Earth Orbit, where space elevators, orbital industry, and planetary logistics are essential to human power and identity. At the center of that world is the Steggles family. Ord Steggles is a self-made titan of the space elevator age, brilliant, domineering, and obsessed with legacy. His three adult children live in his shadow, each responding to it in radically different ways. Drex, the youngest, is an engineer who builds systems that must work in the real world. Sasha, the middle child, is an activist and rhetorician who rejects her father’s vision outright. Lucien, the eldest, is the prodigal son, a physicist who left the family years earlier to pursue a singular obsession, and whose return threatens to destabilize both the business and the bonds his absence left behind.
Lucien’s work drives the novel. His research into quantum gravity sits at the boundary between radical theory and practical infrastructure, offering both a path forward for the space elevator industry and the foundation for a far more consequential experiment. One designed to definitively answer one of humanity’s oldest questions, once and for all: are we alone? Whether humanity can live with the result is another matter entirely.
The novel unfolds in four sections. The first follows Drex as he struggles to reconcile his role as a builder with his father’s ambition. The second follows Lucien as scientific ambition and discovery collides with corporate power, politics, and public expectation. The third shifts to Sasha, as ideology, protest, and narrative warfare take center stage in the wake of the result of the LANTERN experiment. The final section brings the siblings together, as the consequences ripple outward and demand irreversible choices.
I’ve been telling people, “Think Contact meets Succession, except everyone is extremely competent and that still might not be enough.”
The next phase of the project will be a structured revision pass, including a self-built LLM-assisted analysis to interrogate structure, pacing, and character arcs across the manuscript. After that, I plan to recruit a larger group of beta readers than I did for my first novel, to pressure-test the book before moving further toward querying and potentially self-publication. If you’re interested in acting as a beta reader, leave a comment or sign up for my mailing list so you don’t miss the official call.
I’ll share more about that process as it develops. For now, it feels good to be able to say that LANTERN exists and is ready to be polished into something I can put in front of readers.