Proximal God: Excursion

by Peter Merrens

If you have to die to live, what survives?

When a prion plague begins hollowing out the human mind, Nobel laureate Maja Nygaard builds the only lifeboat a machine that destroys the body to preserve the self. Her Teleprinter can take a person apart atom by atom and print them anew on Titan. It is escape—
but also exile. Every survivor becomes a refugee from their own flesh.

Fleeing Earth with her brilliant, volatile creation—the quantum child Phanes—Maja leads the last remnant of humanity toward a future none of them can yet comprehend. Titan is no promised land; it is a frontier that will remake anyone who reaches it. Each reprint is a mutation, each body a revision, each survival a step further from what human beings used to be.

As nations fall and the last signals from Earth dissolve into grief, Maja finally confronts the question she has spent a lifetime
If you have to die to live, what endures? And if every reprint changes you, are you crossing the void as a refugee… or arriving as something new?

Proximal Excursion is a sweeping, intimate odyssey about exile, identity, and the dangerous art of creation. It is the story of a woman who never fears the mind she built—and the universe that soon will. It marks the beginning of the rise of Phanes, from novice to something vast, anchored always to the only person it cannot bear to Maja.

For prospective readers: If you like your SF easy to read with battles amongst the stars or dragons, this book is not for you. If, on the other hand, you want to think, laugh, cry and wonder what makes us human...

Kindle Edition

Expected publication April 3, 2026

About the author

It takes some time to prise out the elements of Peter's past that influence his writing. That his rootstock is Armenian and Jewish in equal measure might, as he puts it, have given him "a better instinct for running and hiding than most". That he was raised in Sri Lanka, India, Canada, Singapore and the UK might give him a broad cultural facility.

That he would holiday with his parents in Moscow at the height of the Cold War — until his father was mysteriously killed in a shooting 'accident' when he was 12. That in his early years he would make ends meet by gathering up discarded vegetables from a west London street market, but subsequently built a career that led him to work in a dozen countries, learn multiple languages and live in the UK, Denmark, Singapore, India, the USA, Sri Lanka and France. These elements combine to create a rare comfort with multiple cultures, tempered by introversion and an ingrained fear of relying on others.

He writes fiction and non-fiction and teaches post-graduate students in management and communications at UT (Dallas). He is a Leadership coach for certain CEOs. And if that was not enough, he writes physics papers, that may be wrong — but that is the point.

Today, Peter lives in a self-built home in the middle of a bluebell wood in rural Kent, the wannabe Napa valley of the UK, and can be found sharpening axes, carrying trees and foraging when not obsessively researching some new topic. He is married to Hannah who is, thank Phanes, a merciless editor.