About the Series

Lights in the Sky is a trilogy of SF novels. The first two volumes, A Children’s Crusade, and The Fixed Stars were completed in 2014 and 2015. The conclusion of the series, The Lost Colony, was finished in August 2016. A television pilot script, called ‘Lights in the Sky’, has also been written.
The trilogy has been joined by a prequel, The leftover girl, which tells the story of the genesis of the Alpha Mission and what happened back on Earth after its expeditionary probe departed. This fourth volume was completed in 2017, and has now been joined by another novel set in the same fictional universe, exploring the effects of climate change, called After the Flood, completed earlier in 2018. The final novel of the sextet, entitled Maya, is now underway and will be finished sometime in the New Year.

The first volume of the original trilogy, A Children’s Crusade is serialized on this website, as are the opening chapters of novels four and five.

The series is set roughly one hundred years from now, in a world where a lot of the things we worry about today, severe climate change, rising sea levels, environmental degradation, and resource depletion, have come about. As a result the future of human civilization is threatened by war, famine, political instability, and mass migration.
The response has been to send an exploration and colonization expedition to our nearest star system. The first three novels tell the story of the human element of this expedition, who are all still children when the series opens.