With no idea how to start things off, and only the internet for (bad) advice, I thought I would start with some background and flavour of the trilogy I am writing to whet the appetite.
The Fisher Queen is the first installment of my trilogy, a series set on a future earth and mostly played out in country called Cambria. It’s “soft” science fiction, with a healthy dose of post-apocalyptic dystopian darkness thrown in.
What is soft science fiction?
Soft SF (often called social/philosophical SF) focuses on people, society, and ideas rather than technical details and scientific accuracy.
Hard SF asks “What if we developed this technology?” and explores the engineering in detail – like The Martian showing exactly how someone survives on Mars using real physics and chemistry.
Soft SF asks “What would society look like if…” or “How would people change if…” – it uses futuristic or speculative settings to explore human nature, culture, politics, psychology, and philosophy. The science is often background rather than the point.
The Fisher Queen is soft SF because:
• My fictional world has technology constraints, but I don’t go into enormous engineering detail of how that works. Life on earth is technologically behind our world, so much of the time it might feel more like an early 20th century setting, even though it isn’t
• The story explores how a society functions when it prioritizes collective happiness over technological advancement, how that works well in isolation, and then how it reacts to aggression and violence.
• My central point is philosophical: “Can humanity be happy?”
• Character relationships, moral dilemmas, and social structures drive the plot, not geeking out on uber tech (which I love, it’s just not that)
Sound good?
Great, then keep reading, you might even get to the end of this newsletter without TLDR’ing me. Here is my current synopsis of the whole trilogy (rather than Book 1 only), I’d love to know what you think:
Eight hundred years after The Reckoning killed eleven billion people, Cambria thrives as humanity’s grand experiment. A constellation of peaceful villages protected by ancient technology and built on a radical premise: that humans flourish not through endless technological advancement, but through community, purpose, and lives lived at human scale.
Tom Peters has never questioned his world. He trains for races across Cambria’s rewilded hills, works his Community Service and raises his adopted daughter Ada with fiancée Sita. In Cambria, doors have no locks. There are no cities and barely any technology. No armies and little crime. Peace isn’t just policy, it’s the air they breathe.
Then Ada is kidnapped.
The impossible happened: The Arc, Cambria’s protective barrier, is breached by a brutal regime from the harsh world beyond. Behind the throne stands an a-mortal from before The Reckoning whose centuries of manipulation and cruelty have left empires in ruins. Now his mortality has finally arrived, and he’ll hold Cambria hostage to force the ancient powers who created it to save him.
As the crisis deepens, Tom and Sita discover that defending paradise requires becoming people they never imagined. A society built on trust faces an enemy who exploits trust. A culture that abandoned violence must decide what it’s willing to sacrifice.
Can a peaceful people fight a war without losing themselves? Can utopia survive contact with those who would destroy it? And when the cost of victory equals the cost of defeat, what choice remains?
Thank you for reading, it’s much appreciated. Feel free to reply, I’m always interested to know what you think 🙂