Future Series

Sovereigns of the Storm

Sovereigns of the Storm is a two-book series set mid-way between The Glorious Resolution (set during 2035-40) and Sovereigns of the Collapse (set in 2106-07)

The notorious Sack of Oxford occurred on the night of May Day 2073. As a result of its horrors, the sovereign caste of Britain was shocked into a heightened state of paranoia, with massive additions to fortifications and severe restrictions on travel. These form the world of the later Sovereigns of the Collapse series.

Prentice Nightminster is eighteen years old in the summer of 2072. Despite coming from a poor family in Bermondsey industrial asylum, through patience and hard work he is amassing capital. He makes a tidy (if dangerous) income trading with travellers out in the wild ruins around Bermondsey. He is a corporal in the reserve of General Wardian glory trust. He works as a technician in an electronics factory repairing cavity magnetrons for anti-aircraft guns. He tutors the children of the local ultramarine owner, who runs Bermondsey asylum. In a few years he will have saved enough gold to commence a life on the wild seas as a roving trader, master of his own schooner, free as a wandering albatross.

To pacify his insistent physics teacher, he also applies to the University of Oxford, although only out of curiosity and to keep his parents off his back. To his annoyance, he succeeds in getting a place! This creates another problem in his complicated life.

During a riot he takes a decisive action that saves the life of Victorina Krossington, the beautiful young firebrand of the fabulous Krossington sovereign dynasty. Suddenly, a lot of people are interested in Nightminster. He’s going to Oxford University after all. However, getting high marks will not be his main purpose.

From that moment, his life is set on a course for tragedy that will haunt the rest of his life.

The Glorious Resolution

The Glorious Resolution of 2038-40 was the most catastrophic social collapse in human history. It brought our age of affluence, the Public Era, to an end.

How did we let this happen? How did nine billion people let their world suffer such a calamity that 90% of them died in the chaos that ensued?

These questions are asked ever after. There is a popular trope that the Glorious Resolution was planned and executed by a conspiracy that became the sovereign caste of ‘decent society’. A few thinking people like Vasco Banner and later Lawrence Aldingford (characters in Sovereigns of the Storm and Sovereigns of the Collapse) make quite detailed enquiries and come to that exact conclusion too. Each suffers for it, in their own way.

Are they right? In all seriousness, could a conspiracy bring down our sophisticated, vastly complex global society of numerous autonomous nation states with their powerful armed forces and secret services? And what about all the global corporations, with their notoriously international presence, so powerful that they can play nation states off against each other? Perhaps beneath all that impressive firepower, wealth and intellect there is a vulnerability; unseen, unspoken, but increasingly pervasive?

I hope to launch this series later in 2021. Sign up for my newsletter to be first to know about it.