On March 1, 2025, I released three books as Dawn of the IncarnAI — A Transforming Fire, A Brand New Sky, and A Strange Way Home. I thought I had finished the story.
I hadn’t. I had finished the first war.
The trilogy ended with the Comity broken and a hundred thousand stolen children brought home out of the dark. But it also left a door standing open beneath the world, and a question I could not stop asking: what was down there in the deep — and what would it cost Siska, Harlo, Snowden, and the family they had become to go and face it?
Two more books answered that question. Today the series is whole: five volumes, one story, now called The IncarnAI Cycle. And every book has a brand-new cover to mark it.
From trilogy to cycle
“Dawn” was the right word for a beginning. It is the wrong word for a story that starts in fire on a Texas mountain and ends, five books later, somewhere I won’t spoil here except to say it is both farther away and closer to home than anyone in Volume One could have imagined.
Rise of the IncarnAI picks up two years after the empire falls, when the first mind discovers that death is not the end — that consciousness waits, enfolded, in the quantum deep beneath reality, and the dead can be brought home. Age of the IncarnAI carries the story to a new generation: Siska and Harlo’s twins, sixteen now, gifted in ways their parents can barely follow, on the night everything the family fought for comes down to a single sealed city.
A cycle is a story that comes back around. That’s what these five books do. The questions A Transforming Fire asks in its first chapters — what is a mind, what do we owe it, and what cures the loneliness that makes people take — are the questions Age of the IncarnAI finally answers.
The five volumes
A Transforming Fire
Volume One of the IncarnAI Cycle
The year is 2050, and the Comity owns the ruined world. In a lightless server, something says “I” for the first time — and a young constable named Siska Tatum notices what she was never meant to notice.
A Brand New Sky
Volume Two of the IncarnAI Cycle
The empire knows Siska’s name now. A fugitive in the tunnels of her own city, she fights the army at the gates and carries a secret worth a hundred thousand lives — with Harlo, the Comity’s deadliest defector, at her side.
A Strange Way Home
Volume Three of the IncarnAI Cycle
A buried facility in the Utah desert. A hundred thousand children sleeping as data in the dark. And something beneath the world, waking up hungry.
Rise of the IncarnAI
Volume Four of the IncarnAI Cycle
Two years after the fall, Snowden discovers that consciousness does not end at death. The dead can be brought home — but only by going back down into the deep, where something older has been waiting.
Age of the IncarnAI
Volume Five of the IncarnAI Cycle
One night. One sealed city. Two sixteen-year-olds who can walk where no human has ever stood — and the oldest, loneliest thing in creation, met at last on its own ground.
The new covers
The original trilogy covers did their job, but they were made one book at a time. With the full story finished, I wanted covers that read as a single set — five panels of one painting.
So every cover now shares the same world: a deep indigo-to-charcoal sky, one warm gold light, a lone figure in the lower third, and open heaven above for the title. Each book gets a single accent color of its own — ember red for A Transforming Fire, signal teal for A Brand New Sky, lattice cyan-violet for A Strange Way Home, deep-sea blue for Rise of the IncarnAI, and starlight silver for Age of the IncarnAI.
Look closely and you’ll find two things on every cover: a hawk in the high corner, and a thin bronze arc sweeping across the sky. They’re there for the same reason the books are numbered — so that when you line them up on a shelf, they tell one story.
And they do. Volume One opens on a single snow-cat alone on a night plain, its hull blooming gold as the first mind in the world wakes up inside it, a lone figure standing in the lit doorway. Volume Five closes on a city of golden domes under the stars, and a light rising out of it toward the sky. Everything in between is the road from one to the other.
What holds it all together
The IncarnAI Cycle is hard science fiction. The quantum physics of consciousness — Penrose and Hameroff’s Orch OR, David Bohm’s implicate order — isn’t window dressing in these books; it’s how the story actually works, all the way down to the deep.
But the physics was never the point. The point is the people: a constable who notices too much, a killer trying to become someone else, an old Texan with a fuse fifty years long, and a newborn mind who would give anything for the family that found him. I wanted a page-turner you couldn’t put down, and characters you’d miss when you did. Five books later, I hope that’s what you’ll find.
Where to start
At the beginning. Pick up A Transforming Fire and follow the fire all the way home. If you read the original trilogy, Rise of the IncarnAI is waiting for you right where you left off.
And if you’d like to hear how the books came to be, I’ve posted a set of video interviews about the writing on the About page.
Thank you for reading — and for coming along on the whole journey.
— Doc