Monastery

The Lost Archive #1

by Dylan Byford

In a colonised and crumbling future solar system, humanity is struggling to survive the catastrophic loss of centuries of precious knowledge. The beings that caused this loss, the machine intelligences known as the Configurations, are spoken of with hatred and with fear. Have they left humanity to its own fate? Could they be buried still, deep in the infrastructure?
Engage-Assault Li, a brash, young soldier, is hired as a bodyguard for Qira, an academic with knowledge of the infrastructure. Together they travel into the wild lands of Titan, to a remote monastery where a mysterious, mechanical ‘Voice’ requires their help. As the moon around him collapses into civil war and he fights to save those he has come to love, Li must also learn that what lurks in the monastery is worth preserving, not fearing.

368 pages, ebook

Published October 14, 2014

About the author

Dylan Byford is writer of science fiction and cyberpunk from the north of England. He is the author of Airedale, a northern-set near-future thriller, as well as the epic SF series The Lost Archive, set in a crumbling and colonised solar system, where all of humanity’s accumulated knowledge has been destroyed.

As well as producing books, Dylan blogs about the writing process, politics, systems and emergentism on his blog site www.dylanbyford.com.

Sign up for his emails (http://eepurl.com/cFKNVX) and get a free and exclusive map of the Lost Archive universe and irregular nuggets of mythic history, ‘deleted scenes’ and vignettes of exotic settings.

Communicate with Dylan at his Facebook page here: www.facebook.com/dylanbyfordwriter/

And follow him on Twitter here: twitter.com/dylan_byford

Reviews

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite difficult to get into [not in a bad way, just needed concentration to figure out what was going on]. I was not entirely sure at all times that it knew what it wanted to be, but when it got going, it was a very enjoyable read. Great ideas, great settings and quite unique IMO.

[Tim Tofton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nearly gave up on this one but persevered and it was probably worth it. The story picked up in the second half, not sure why, possibly the characters where a bit one dimensional.

[Gingerelvis · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic sci-fi adventure, well written with superbly drawn characters.
Reminiscent at times of Iain M Banks at times but still very original, I hope there's more to come.