The Celestial Way
A solarpunk space opera
When you have lost everything, can you still find your way among the stars?
Ferrtau the Lightbringer has declared war on reality itself. Driven insane with grief, he ravages the world of Terra Para, seeking to take control of the Shard, which will enable him to attain his mad quest. But what pushed the galaxy’s greatest champion over the edge?
Airo Blueborn is awakened after seven centuries of cryostasis and sent to stop Ferrtau as a last resort. Known as the Dragonslayer, Airo hates dragons with a burning rage—yet promptly ends up as the sole guardian of Veralla, a fledgling dragon.
Hatched into a hostile world, Veralla wants to understand why there is so much pain and suffering all around her, especially beneath the hard shell of her embittered protector. She also needs to grow up fast if she is to survive a war-torn planet.
The Celestial Way is a story about healing old wounds and finding redemption. Set in a shattered galaxy, featuring transhumanism, dragons, and a cutting-edge blend of magic and technology, this space opera embarks on an epic journey to discover the light and love inside each of us.
Some non-marketing talk
When I started work on TCW back in 2016, I had three primary goals in mind:
- Write a novel with dragons as sapient species, going beyond the typical “dragon rider” story
- Make an authentic, believable fusion between science fiction and fantasy fiction
- Create a world that will act as the new gold standard for a far future setting*
*(surpassing recognizable franchises like Star Wars, Star Trek, Mass Effect, Eclipse Phase, Dune, etc.)
It took me seven iterations to get those goals crystallized, and then three years to write the book itself. Along the way, I became fascinated with the concept of solarpunk – aka sustainability and holistic integration on a civilizational scale – so I designed TCW’s world from the ground up with that paradigm in mind. It was a great challenge, not only because I was shooting for the stars, but also it was my first English-written work on such a scale. (I’m a non-native speaker writer.)
Going back to Goal #1, in the many, many books, movies, and videogames I’ve experienced over the years, I have never encountered a space opera with dragons involved. Sure, there’s McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern, there’s Shadowrun, and a few others, but none of them is a space opera: that peculiar genre so-oft ridiculed yet so little understood by readers and writers alike. OK – we have Peter Hamilton’s Fallen Dragon, but the “dragons” in that book are star-shaped boulders floating through space – hardly related to the classical creatures of myth, no? And, all right, there are a few types of dragons in Star Wars – yet Star Wars today is very outdated in terms of verisimilitude, with little to no organized internal consistency in the first place.
The closest and most accurate (and enjoyable) examples I can think of are The Last Dragon Chronicles and The Erth Dragons by Chris d’Lacey, and the upcoming sequel to Golden Treasure: The Great Green by Dreaming Door Studios. In the meantime, I’m doing my part enriching our collective imagination library.
Lastly, the blend between fantasy and sci-fi. For some reason, people – on both sides of the “fence” – tend to scoff at the notion of combining the two. Why? More and more of our cutting-edge knowledge discovers that the underlying workings of the universe are nothing short of magic, while the 21st century saw a resurgence of spirituality and renewed vigor for understanding the world of the unseen. To insist that science and magic are incompatible is to profess ignorance (willful or otherwise) of the holistic nature of reality. Given my years of study in both the empirical and the esoteric, I consider sci-fantasy to be not only viable literature, but the future of speculative fiction in general.
To that end, I’ve done my best to create a world where both principles are regarded with understanding and seen as mirrors to each other. The setting of TCW is one where rationality and sense of wonder exist side by side, not “smashed together” with the proverbial kitchen sink, but rather playing off one another, each asking questions that can only be answered when the whole picture is regarded in its entirety with wide open eyes.
That said, this monumental project is still in its infancy. And it is merely a springboard to much greater paradigmatic shifts for a better society and a brighter tomorrow. Art is food for the soul; its purpose is to revitalize the spirit, for it in turn to manifest that energy into a reality most pleasing for creator and creation both. Which is to say, art inspires us to do better. To always ask the next question, as Theodore Sturgeon has asked us to do.
In the meantime, if you are interested in how one such experiment plays out, I invite you to read The Celestial Way.