OA Allen & Peevish Penman · Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction
The Bright Dark
The old world is gone. Nobody remembers it correctly.
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Centuries after the modern world destroyed itself, civilization has returned to New Zealand.
Sort of.
Electricity is a mystery. Germs sound like a conspiracy theory. Ancient technology is excavated, catalogued and occasionally misunderstood. Three-horned livestock wander the roads. Enormous predators haunt the Wastelands. History has become religion, folklore and badly remembered technical documentation.
And Ren wants to understand all of it.
Twenty years old, painfully curious and much better with a scroll than a weapon, Ren expects Recruitment Day to make him a scribe.
Instead, one spectacularly bad decision puts him in the Guard.
Then an old captain offers him something far more dangerous than the career he wanted.
A career?
A mission.
Find the Ishim.
Rarefication.
A lost process. Or a lost lie.
The Ishim
The first settlers left behind stories of rarefication—a lost process by which human beings supposedly abandoned their physical bodies and became luminous entities called plasmoids.
- Most people treat the Ishim as history.
- Some treat them as gods.
- Ren thinks they might be real.
Now someone is meddling with portals, and a secretive elder guard believes the vanished settlers may be the only ones who understand what is happening.
Ren is sent across the island toward remote Dunedin with an official rank near the bottom of society, a guard-issued knife he barely knows how to use, and an excellent cover story.
Official assignment: dig a cesspit. Actual mission: find beings no one can prove exist.The farther Ren travels,
the stranger history becomes.
A World That Argues With Itself
Beyond Auck City, the tidy version of civilization Ren learned from scrolls begins to fall apart. Nomads cross landscapes that once lay beneath the sea. Communities argue over whether recovering old technology will save humanity or lead it back toward the catastrophe that destroyed the modern world.
Metal can be progress in one settlement and corruption in another. Science resembles mysticism. Mysticism sometimes behaves disturbingly like science.
And in the Zubian Waste, impossible lights move across the landscape while people who live among them speak about reality as though thought itself can leave footprints.
Ren wanted evidence.
He begins finding far too much of it.
A Post-Apocalyptic World That Moved On Without Us
The Bright Dark is not a story about survivors picking through the immediate wreckage of civilization. The apocalypse is ancient history. Humanity has already rebuilt.
New cultures have formed. New governments control territory. Roads carry coaches and rubbish carts. Guilds feud. Workers organize. Guards maintain an uneasy order. Villages decide which pieces of the past they want back—and which should remain buried.
The people of this world do not dream of restoring ours.
They have their own world to protect.
Knowledge Is Power
That is what Ren has always been taught.
But information is not the same thing as understanding.
His search for the Ishim pulls him into conflicts between technological reclamation and rejection, cities and nomads, hierarchy and autonomy, the material world and something far more difficult to define.
The deeper Ren travels into the mysteries left by the first settlers, the less certain he becomes that humanity ever understood reality in the first place.
There are doors in this world that should perhaps remain closed.
Ren has never been very good at leaving doors alone.
The Bright Dark
A post-apocalyptic science-fiction novel about lost technology, competing civilizations, anomalous phenomena, and one relentless truthseeker discovering that the strangest relic of the old world may be its understanding of reality itself.
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