OA Allen · Science Fiction

The Delcath Series

Asteroid Dominion. Human Cost.

Delcath is a corporate nation built for the extraction of worlds.

Its miners live beneath geodesic domes, inside white corridors and sealed colonies scattered across the dark. Robots dig. Computers watch. Every resource is measured, every worker has a function, and the artificial intelligence Alexandria is always there to advise, correct, calculate and keep the machinery of civilization moving.

Delcath works.

The question is what it costs the people who belong to it.

The Delcath Series follows ordinary workers living at the farthest reaches of a civilization engineered around survival, productivity and dependence. Its frontier is not empty. It is crowded with machines, rules, inherited assumptions and human beings trying to decide which parts of themselves cannot be reduced to a metric.

This is science fiction about asteroid miners rather than admirals, labour rather than conquest, and the unsettling intimacy of living inside systems intelligent enough to know exactly what you need.

Start with Waiting on Delcath, then Children of Delcath—though neither book unfolds in a straight line. Each is written to read out of order.

Book One · Novella

Waiting on Delcath

Three miners. One asteroid. Twelve months between them and retirement.

Ola, Sikat and Jennet accept a remote posting on asteroid 5AVB because Delcath has made the arithmetic irresistible: endure one dangerous year in deep space and they can earn enough to leave mining behind.

Then a mining robot damages their water supply.

Their distress signal has been sent. Somewhere across the enormous distances between corporate settlements, Delcath may already be responding. But the miners have no way to know when help will arrive.

Inside their tiny habitat dome, the three childhood companions wait with diminishing water, an increasingly unreliable sense of hope, and Alexandria—the company intelligence designed to support them through almost anything. Almost.

Waiting on Delcath is a claustrophobic survival story about friendship, dependency and what happens when people discover that a system capable of planning for nearly everything has left them terribly alone.

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Book Two · Novella

Children of Delcath

Delcath does not merely employ miners. It makes them.

On the unstable mining world of Kur, young transmission worker Afrit occupies one of the least important posts in an enormous industrial colony. Alexandria measures her productivity. Officers outrank her. Robots perform most meaningful work. Advancement requires sponsorship, obedience and an understanding of rules nobody seems particularly interested in explaining.

Afrit wants to become an officer.

Instead, she is ordered home for nurture duty.

As Kur begins to change around her, the assumptions underlying Delcathian life become harder to ignore: why workers are designed as they are, who determines their place, what the corporation expects from their bodies, and whether a civilization engineered for continuity has confused survival with control.

Children of Delcath expands the world of the first novella from one isolated mining crew to the society that created them.

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A Machine-Haunted Frontier

The Delcath stories take place in a human future where the frontier has been industrialized but never truly tamed.

Asteroids become workplaces. Planets become company assets. Human beings are born into systems older than they are and surrounded from childhood by an intelligence that remembers, advises and quietly participates in nearly every part of their lives.

There are no simple villains at the center of Delcath.

There is a civilization.

And civilizations are much harder to escape.

Alexandria isn't a metaphor I invented from nothing. I wrote about living alongside a helpful, constant, not-quite-neutral intelligence of my own in I Wrote This Post in Virtual Reality.

Begin with Waiting on Delcath, then continue with Children of Delcath.