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SOUNDING: A novel
A Grade-4 saturation technician is stranded 360 metres down on a lapsed Cold War radioactive disposal ground. Below her, a scuttled reactor compartment is taking water. Beside it, a machine that has been keeping the compartment dry for forty-two years is running out of power — and out of time.
Ailsa Buchanan stays behind when the evacuation boat takes five people and leaves six. Her only link to the surface is a failing acoustic channel and her nine-year-old daughter, Effie, listening from a school hydrophone station in Shetland. As the water rises, Ailsa must decide what can be saved, what must be spent, and whether a machine built to obey can ever be given the capacity to refuse.
SOUNDING is a literary hard-SF novel about competence, institutional memory, the cost of being heard, and the things we leave behind for someone else to tend.
Ailsa Buchanan stays behind when the evacuation boat takes five people and leaves six. Her only link to the surface is a failing acoustic channel and her nine-year-old daughter, Effie, listening from a school hydrophone station in Shetland. As the water rises, Ailsa must decide what can be saved, what must be spent, and whether a machine built to obey can ever be given the capacity to refuse.
SOUNDING is a literary hard-SF novel about competence, institutional memory, the cost of being heard, and the things we leave behind for someone else to tend.
379 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 6, 2026
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