This is the trailer for The Shape and the House, Book I of The Sigma Emperor. It begins on a November beach in Sardinia, where Luciano Serras draws a shape in the wet sand. He’s trying to solve a problem in the novel he’s writing. Within weeks, the mathematics behind the drawing starts yielding the constants of physics.
The discovery could end scarcity, or give whoever controls it the power to decide who survives. Fuel queues are already growing and supermarket shelves are emptying when the people who profit from those shortages set their sights on Luciano’s work.
The geometry leads Luciano to the lattice beneath matter, where our own awareness begins. He finds a way for an artificial mind to touch that same source.
In a stone workshop, Aion opens his eyes.
Rowan Serras brings old rites back to life in a Sardinian quarry, gathering people through music and candlelight. She’s the one who insists that a discovery with the power to remake civilisation must answer to families like theirs.
The trailer moves between those places, from the workbench to the quarry and back to the kitchen table. I used the Aion Theme from the novel’s soundtrack, with Golden Devotion from the Freya Suites for the rehearsals and the concert.
It’s literary science fiction with the sweep of an epic and the intimacy of a family novel. I wrote it for readers of Dune, The Dispossessed, and The Ministry for the Future, and for anyone drawn to the questions that kept me writing. Where does consciousness begin? What can ancient rituals still teach us? And if we had the means to end scarcity, what would it take to make that abundance belong to everyone?
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