Season Five of The Sunset Chronicles is here, with a tasty double bill of episodes for your e-reader of choice.
The journey home was never going to be easy. For the crew of the Minos, the question is whether they should make it at all.
Years into their desperate voyage back to Earth, the crew of the Minos find themselves caught between impossible choices — a ship that feels more like a trap with every passing day, and a cargo that might save humanity, or hold its doom. Wyn commands what remains of her fractured crew with quiet resolve, but the void outside holds its own threats, and the uneasy stalemate aboard cannot hold forever.
Back on Earth, not everyone has given up hope. In the swaying fields of rural Nigeria, a father counts the days and listens for a signal that hasn’t come. In the rubble of a besieged London tower block, two men receive a message from the darkness that suggests someone, somewhere, hasn’t forgotten them. In the corridors of power and the back alleys beneath them, others are moving quietly, carefully, toward ends of their own.
In Season Five of The Sunset Chronicles, secrets hidden in the black of space and the depths of the Earth are finally coming to light—and the truth may be more lethal than the darkness.
Season Five finds our illustrious cast of heroes rounded out by a new addition — Oban Garba, Wyn's father. I started to write Oban's story with the aim for it to be a thriller standalone story in the same vein as the Walker prequel (which, by the way, if you haven't checked out yet, you really should). But at some point that tale became enmeshed with the main strands of the story, so I took the decision to fold him into the main narrative. His story will give us another view on the general global collapse, as well as a very real view of the impact of the Mar on the wider world. As well as that, I wanted to use Oban to explore Wyn a little better — hopefully through his tale you might begin to see a new side of her, too, and what she's been through to get up onto the Minos in the first place.
If you've been following along with the Chronicles and have been waiting patiently since the end of season 4 for the newest episodes, you might have been a little frustrated, for which I can only apologise. The good news is that in between releasing the last episode of Season Four and these two episodes, I have actually written 'THE END' on the first draft of the seventh and final season, as I posted previously. So, as of right now, the complete saga exists, if only within a Scrivener file, for now.
Since then, I've fully re-edited this fifth season with that ending in mind, to make sure that everything fits the direction I now know the story is going. And, let me tell you, this season is an absolute doozy. I hope you'll join me for the ride. That work is completely done, and I’m working my way through the second draft of Season Six as we speak.
So, things are moving on at a reasonable pace. The reason? Well, after a somewhat tortuous four year process, I have finally been diagnosed with ADHD, and been given some medication to deal with it. While they’re not quite the panacea that I’d hoped they’d be (I mean, I pretty much imagined they’d be like some kind of superpower, like finding a green lantern), they’re certainly helping me get ‘more shit done’. This is, for you, dear reader, excellent news, because I’m now barrelling through editing at a pace not unlike that which Wyn finds herself trying to get away from the Minos in the second of these two episodes.
It’s funny, because the Minos has been at the heart of everything involving the Chronicles. She had a name before Wyn or any of the other characters — in fact I think she might be the only surviving element of the long-deleted first attempt at this story, written over a decade ago, other than the ice moon of Europa itself. So it is with some trepidation that I hear Wyn’s plans for her. Surely this can’t be the end for Humanity’s last hope…
Right?
If you’ve been a bit on the fence about starting the Chronicles because you’ve been burned too many times by series not making the finish line, then now’s your time to start, because I can give you a cast-iron guarantee that we’ll be making it to that line, even if it kills me.
If that’s you, did you know that there’s a Series Page for The Chronicles on Amazon where you can get every episode with the click of a single button? And because I’ve kept the price as low as it’s possible to go for each episode, did you know that means you’d get all 22 episodes for only £17/$24.64? That’s 440,000 words of sci-fi horror madness, right to your Kindle.
As I write this, I’m starting to think a lot about what life is going to look like, after the Chronicles. I’ve got a few idea bubbling away, but I’ve also been ruminating on some thoughts about the future of publishing, the internet, and more besides. As a writer, especially one who’s been living in a science fiction bubble for so long, I feel like it’s my job to a certain extent to try and work out the future, not just in terms of what tech might evolve but in terms of where we, as a global peoples, are heading. Increasingly, that’s a job that seems harder and harder by the day.
I’ve launched a new blog to try and sort out my thoughts on a lot of this, starting with an essay on the future of publishing and how we can rescue it from an increasingly enshittified ecosystem. At some point, I will be migrating fully from Substack over to that site, but it’s on a new platform that doesn’t have all the bells and whistles yet.
In the meantime, come find me at The (other) Hollow Stone and join the conversation. I’m not saying we can steer a way out of these global messes on our own, but maybe we can find some way to chart a course through them.
Until next time, happy reading.
Paul
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