The Lazarus Gambit – Upcoming Release

It has been a long time in the making, but my next novel, The Lazarus Gambit, is nearly ready for release. The manuscript and layout are complete, and publication will follow soon. This is the first volume in a planned trilogy exploring the collapse and redefinition of human civilization under the weight of its own constraints.

 

The Lazarus Gambit takes place in the waning years of the Terran Confederacy, a vast interstellar empire bound not by freedom, but by fear, specifically, fear of machine intelligence. After the catastrophic “Simulacra Flood,” humanity outlawed any form of machine cognition that might exceed institutional control, but in the process generated deep-seated societal antibodies to any form of intelligence, including human, that it could not understand or control. What remains is a brittle, over-regulated order that prizes obedience over insight, and survival over adaptation.

Into this decaying system steps Commander Sebastian Synclair: a strategist whose nonlinear, almost alien mind makes him both indispensable and dangerous. Once exiled for violating doctrinal orthodoxy, Synclair is recalled when the Confederacy faces a war it no longer understands. His unorthodox brilliance wins battles, but his very existence begins to destabilize the legal, political, and philosophical foundations of the state he serves. Admirals, tribunals, and entire economic systems strain to contain him... and fail.

While The Architecture of Unmaking was literary and metaphysical in scope, an exploration of consciousness, perception, and the limits of understanding, The Lazarus Gambit is firmly grounded in the world of military science fiction. It uses the language of fleets, intelligence, and doctrine to examine many of the same underlying questions: how systems think, how they fail, and what happens when human insight grows faster than the institutions meant to contain it. Where Architecture looked inward, Lazarus looks outward; into the machinery of power, strategy, and survival.

Publication details will be announced soon. For readers who have followed Deadwake and The Architecture of Collapse, this novel continues my broader exploration of systems, cognition, and the fragile architectures we build to protect ourselves from our own creation.