THE CLOSING

Book One of AS IS

A NOTE BEFORE THE STORY

This story begins in the year 2851, a little more than eight hundred years from the day we are writing this. Here is what you need to know to walk in.

By 2851, people have lived among the stars for centuries. Nobody finds habitable worlds; they build them, the way cities were once built — slowly, expensively, by companies with equipment and schedules. And life itself is something you can commission: animals are designed, grown to full size in a handful of seasons, and licensed, under laws as old and as boring as aviation law. A dragon is not a miracle in 2851. It is a product, and it arrives on a delivery date. That is not the same thing as being understood.

A word about time, because dates are everywhere in this story. Every settled world keeps the old calendar: Earth's years, Earth's months, Earth's seasons, by the old northern reckoning. It is the one shared calendar everybody works from. So when this book says the spring of a year, it means that shared calendar's spring — nobody's local weather, everybody's shared time.

In 2851, a group of very rich strangers — fans of the same eight-hundred-year-old books and films, the ones we still read now — met on a forum and bought a moon. It was for sale cheap, sold the way salvage is sold: as is, where is, no inspection, no warranty. They wanted the world from the stories. They built it.

Everything that follows comes from that decision.

— J.C.

The paintings, maps, and extras live on the book's companion site; nothing there is required, and spoilers stay locked until you finish each book.

THE PROSPECTUS