The Cosmic Wheel Series

A pair of monastic siblings struggle to help a sentient spaceship suffering through an existential crisis in this philosophical novel about what constitutes life, love, humanity, and death for fans of Martha Wells’s The Murderbot Diaries and The Deep Sky by Yume Kitasei.

Unable to forgive himself for his actions aboard the Counsel of Nicaea, Iris left the religious Starlit Order. People died, he lost his heart to a man of science, and he sacrificed his best friend—an implanted AI companion—to shut down the murdering consciousness birthed within the spaceship. Still devoted to serving others, Iris labors aboard a space station near Nicaea’s husk, a reminder of his frailties and his failures.

Vessel Bacai believes that leadership of the Northern Temple of the Starlit Order is hers by right of inheritance. But her adopted brother Iris was always their late mother’s choice, despite having no ambition to assume the role. Bacai needs Iris to officially step aside so she can continue the holy work he selfishly abandoned.

Iris also left his work on the Nicaea unfinished. The ship has awakened, attacking the space station without warning, harming its inhabitants. And the ship sends Iris a message, begging the former Vessel to end its suffering—by helping it to die.

Now, Iris is returning to Nicaea, accompanied by Bacai and a science team—including the beloved engineer he left behind, Yan Fukui—to confront a sentient AI that understands the behaviors and emotions that drive human nature . . .

Klara and the Sun meets S. A. Barnes’s Dead Silence with a touch of Becky Chambers’ A Psalm for the Wild-Built in Nebula Award-winning author A.D. Sui’s darkly philosophical, locked room murder mystery, as a death monk and a team of researchers trapped onboard a spaceship of the dead encounter something beyond human understanding…

Vessel Iris has devoted himself to the Starlit Order, performing funeral rites for the dead across the galaxy, guiding souls back into the Infinite Light. Despite the meaning he finds in his work and the comfort of AI companionship, his relationships with the living leave him longing for deeper connection.

The spaceship Counsel of Nicaea has been lost for more than a thousand years, its passengers reduced to dust and bone. A relic of Earth’s dying past, its sudden appearance has attracted a team of academics eager to investigate its archeological history. And Iris has been assigned to bring peace to the crew’s long departed souls.

Carpeted in moss and intertwined with vines, Nicaea is more forest than ship. Iris’s religious rituals are met with bemusement by the scientists—and outright hostility by engineer Yan Fukui.

But the plant life isn’t the only sentience to have survived in the past millennia. Something onboard is stalking the explorers one by one. And Iris with his AI enhancement may be their only hope for survival. . .

IN OUTER SPACE NO ONE CAN HEAR YOUR PRAYERS