The series map
One universe, told in separate series that each stand alone. This is where they sit in time and how they reach toward one another. You never need the map to read a book — it is here for the pleasure of seeing the whole shape at once.
The Founding
2026–2071A signal arrives from a direction with nothing behind it, spacetime fractures, and the first crossing happens to somebody who was not trying to cross anything.
The Institutional Age
2123–2180Training programmes, licensing bodies and navigation corps — the machinery every later era inherits, built by people who did not know what it would cost.
The Deep Frontier
2191–2220The long push past the charted dark — found ships, what the Architects left behind, first contact, and the rank of Captain invented mid-voyage.
The Frontier Golden Age
2240–2246Expansion at full pace, a cold war humming beneath it, and the slow recognition that the golden age is the crime.
⟶ then the longest silence on the map before the next era begins
The Guttering Age
2312–2342Two generations of abundance later: free energy, a terraformed Mars, instant reach — and a hated Earth. Then somebody counts the stars that should still be burning, and the roads start being rationed by the people who have to live beside them.
The Silence is the origin: the signal that starts everything in 2047, the first fracture in spacetime — the point the whole map is drawn around.
The Drift builds the institutions — the navigation corps, the licensing bodies, the first crossings — that every later series inherits.
The Long Watch is the deep-frontier era a generation on: found ships, first contacts, and the rank of Captain itself, invented mid-voyage.
Spent Light and The Reach run in parallel in the 2240s and converge on a single moment — a lost ship coming home, and the alarm it raises.
Wide Sky opens two generations later, on the far side of the longest gap on the map. The abundance the earlier series were reaching for has arrived — and somebody finally works out what the reaching cost.
Every series is, underneath, the same story told at a different scale: a civilisation crossing the Seam faster than it understands the cost, and the few who start to measure the bill. The novels never lecture it. The careful reader assembles it, book by book — which is the whole pleasure of a map like this one.