Released this winter, Stewart Hotston’s Project Hanuman, is a new science-fiction novel that blends Indian mythology and classic space opera… and we’re delighted to reveal its stunning cover from cover designer Sarah O’Flaherty and cover artist Eleonor Piteira!
Not only that but read on for an extract from the novel (we’re good to you lot aren’t we!).
The Arcology is a pan galactic utopia whose people live entirely online. Tired of paradise, Praveenthi ‘Prab’ Saal had herself printed into the physical world of Sirajah’s Reach, working as an Interlocutor – a go between for the Arcology and the cultures it meets in flesh and blood.
One evening after a call with her family – who are pressuring her to abandon her body and rejoin the Arcology, the city stops. Stops completely – nothing electronic works anymore. Terrified that the Arcology has just up and disappeared, she receives a call for help from a ship in dock whose pilot, Kercher, is a prisoner printed into a body to serve out his sentence in the physical world. Between them they discover it’s not just her planet, but the entire Arcology that’s gone missing. If they don’t find out what’s going on it could be the end of everyone and everything that calls the Arcology home.
Their only resource is their living ship, into which all the knowledge and culture of the Arcology has been downloaded. Asked to be a life raft for the Arcology, the ship, a frigate without a name, is dying – slowly being swallowed whole by the literal universe of information it’s been asked to carry.
Featuring worlds made entirely from gold, an enemy who has no consciousness, allies made of lichen and the grand Ring World of Akhanda – the physical heart of the Arcology. Prab and Kercher will need to put aside their dislike of each other and the Arcology if they’re to help their ship and save anything at all. Can they restore the possibility of hope to their lives?
Want to join Prab and Kercher on their harrowing journey to save the Arcology? Well, we have to wait until November to read Project Hanuman, but for those who can’t wait until then, we have an exclusive extract from the novel right here, which depicts the moment the power goes out…
She frowned.
Her inbox opened by willing it. There were no messages. Her feet twitched, she turned in the street. The grocer’s lights were out. They couldn’t be shut. They never shut.
Then he was there, in his doorway, head tilted back as if the sky would explain what was going on.
‘Morris,’ she called.
Morris, the grocer, stepped out into the street and she crossed over to meet him, hands still in her pockets. He was much shorter than her, thicker too with a long face and no neck to speak of. At some time he’d come from a high gravity environment and, coming here, had never bothered to change his body.
A nod one way then returned. He had the best moustache; thick, blond and unruly like an enthusiastic puppy.
‘Any ideas?’ he asked.
‘Power’s out?’ she replied, still not drawing it in despite the nervousness in Morris’ eyes.
‘Everything’s out,’ he said.
‘I’ve got my inbox’, she replied. Still no messages. No announcements from the city. Nothing in the last hour. Fifty three minutes and eight seconds if she was counting. She’d been wrapping up with her family, had been one hand around a gin and the other holding her chin up off the table lest her mouth get ideas of its own and utter something she couldn’t take back.
‘No messages though,’ said Morris. He flashed up his own. It was spotlessly clean and well kept.
‘How do you manage that?’ she asked stunned and slightly awed.
‘I bin pretty much everything,’ he grinned. ‘A hundred people send me shit all day long. My actual messages go somewhere else.’
A look was given.
He shook his head. ‘Just as empty but I’m not showing you that one.’
‘Any of them in tonight?’ she asked. Investigative muscles twitching without being asked.
‘Only one,’ he said. ‘Came in moaning that his privacy veil wasn’t working.’
Prab stared at Morris.
‘It wasn’t either. Never seen the like.’
Neither of them mentioned it but Prab knew Morris had already understood something she was only just coming to realise. The city ran on the Arcology’s power grid, on its technology. It was theirs despite them tolerating a remarkable degree of dissent, disaffection and multiculturalism. She bitched about the Arcology, but the luxury of her complaints were bathed in its indulgence.
Sirajah’s Reach would be an unsettled ash covered rock if not for the Arcology who perched over them all like a patient parent.
A lack of privacy veil sat in the guts like a stone. It was the one thing Prab missed about belonging, the ever-present ability to hide herself from those who might look. It was the one item she’d instinctively reached for in the months after she’d first left the Arcology. Even now, decades later, she could feel the sense of its absence like a missing limb.
For someone to have come to Morris’ place without their veil spoke of something deeply wrong with the city’s infrastructure. Something much worse than empty skies.
The lights in his unit flickered and came on.
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Panic over.’
Prab, who’d left her connection to the city’s network open was flooded with messages.
Then the lights went off again.
‘Well shit,’ said Morris.
Prab wasn’t listening. Every single message had the same headline.
Emergency call in. With her name in the headline. No images. No audio. Just those words.
Morris was peering into his store but she was on her way. It was a long walk to the office.
She tried several times to reconnect to the network but that one brief flicker of life was all the city had to offer. By her reckoning she was two hours away. Her feet hurt contemplating the distance, the idea of sweat running across skin enough to make Prab shudder.
The only upside being it was time enough to sober up.
The call in demands hung in her vision like old washing left on the line too long, but she refused to take them down in case they disappeared for good. The fear was irrational, they were in her personal space and wouldn’t go anywhere unless she deleted them. Yet a gnawing pessimism had taken hold and wouldn’t leave.
Prab wanted to stop on the way, to check on friends whose homes she’d pass on her walk. As she made to divert to an old lover’s place the first people appeared.
In ones and twos, looking dazed and frightened they came. Coalescing into crowds without thought or direction.
They didn’t speak but to ask if others had heard anything, didn’t do much except linger on the street, drifting this way and that, random particles buffered by invisible winds.
Prab had no answers but no one seemed surprised at this. Who would know what to do if the sun went out? That panic hadn’t descended on the people around her was the only upside Prab could divine.
What had happened to the hen party?
She hoped they were alright. Not enough to engage and do anything about it though. Head down, eyes on her feet, she kept walking, thoughts of diverting to friends’ apartments put away. No one called out, no one tried to intercept her, but the crowds didn’t thin out until she reached the Arcology’s towers.
It was only a matter of time before they followed on and found their way here. If there was something wrong, love them or hate them, the city would ask the Arcology proper to fix it.
Prab’s office was on a shared floor in a tall thin building that reached up to within a whisker of the city’s ash shield. The role of an Interlocutor wasn’t important enough for the Arcology that it could warrant the lofty heights of the upper storeys. Hers was the joy of a lifeless room in the mid teens. About as low as a one could get before plant and machinery took over the floors.
The tower itself was in the heart of the Arcology’s presence, one of a dozen buildings reaching up above the rest of the city and whose materials luminesced with a faint white light.
The landscape of the city meant the towers were visible from just about everywhere. Out at the edges where the ash would seep through the shield into the air and coat everything even on rainy days, they were about a thumb’s height above the horizon but Prab spent her life with them arcing over her head.
You could have left Sirajah’s Reach, she told herself regularly.
You could have left Arcology space entirely. There were plenty of other cultures with just familiar enough physiologies and customs. It wasn’t lack of choice that kept her close.
Instead here she was walking towards it to see what was wrong.
There was little freight between the Arcology and the rest of the city.
The vast majority of the Arcology’s people remained in the worlds they’d manufactured in information space, disembodied from physical flesh even as they wore versions of the same in the boundless sufficiency of the Arcology’s network. They had no need for a physical city beyond the infrastructure needed to run their worlds. If it wasn’t for the Excluded who outnumbered the printed bodies of Arcology members ten to one, Sirajah’s Reach would have been a flat disc of power grids and computational processing power buried under the surface of the planet.
Arriving she found the building unresponsive. The elevators refused to come, the lights refused to light and the air was growing warm and thick as it languished unconditioned inside air tight offices.
‘Because of course they’re not working,’ she complained to a building which could no longer hear her.
On any normal day, Prab kept her network access to a minimum. An unprepared person entering the Arcology’s towers would be bombarded with advertisements for worlds to explore, offers of citizenship exams, directed requests for former members to come home, news of new games, new ideas and new experiences at the sole cost of uploading properly. It could get so a visitor’s vision was fully obscured by these intrusive offers and demands.
Having worked as an Interlocutor at the tower for close to two decades, Prab didn’t need to see the same messages every day. In lieu of having surrendered her privacy veil she’d gone the whole next step of disconnecting entirely apart from essential services.
The doors were unlocked so it was simple enough to make her way through the eerily silent building to the stairwells and start climbing.
About halfway up it was clear that stairs were a form of torture device.
At floor fifteen she had to stop for a rest, unable to continue despite her office only being two more up. She wiped sweat from her lips, the sides of her nose and from across her brow. She couldn’t bear to touch her neck or think what was happening under her clothes.
As long as no one saw her like this it would be fine.
Emerging onto her floor was an exercise in finding her breath and waiting for the world to stop threatening to fade into the narrow tunnel she’d been experiencing for the last few steps.
With a big heavy gulp she pushed across the floor to find it entirely empty. No one at home.
Granted, it was late, but there was usually someone around.
Prab had been hoping to find Mari. It would have given her someone to lean on, someone to laugh about this with.
Right then she felt alone in the worst way. It would have been great to be able to look out over the city night, to remind herself there were people out there who were experiencing the same as she was. All her office offered was bookcase lined walls stacked with her books.
For the first time she looked at the shelves and couldn’t see any point in anything she’d collected. Self-indulgence masquerading as genteel rebellion.
The question of what to do next hung in the air.
The messages made no mention of who to contact or what protocols were in play.
Prab had no idea what the Arcology wanted her to do.
Turning around a couple of times, once to face the door then her shelves a second time then back to the door, Prab had no sense of what was expected. It was as if the Arcology was a catacomb from which the bodies had been removed.
If there was no one to talk to there was no action she could take.
If the Arcology weren’t there to be spoken with the city was on its own. Are we going to die alone and in the dark?
Her stomach turned over at the thought.
How long before the ash shield failed, how long before the people went hungry.
Were ships still in orbit waiting to land? There had to be a way off planet.
Project Hanuman by Stewart Hotston will be released on 11th November 2025 priced at £9.99
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