Evan Graham is a sci-fi author best known for his novel Tantalus Depths (2022). He is a frequent contributor to Duskbound Books’ anthologies with stories set in his Calling Void series… that isn’t a series? His latest story, “Basilisk Whispers,” appears in the upcoming SACRIFICE anthology.
I’ve created something of a monster with The Calling Void. I’ve set myself a paradoxical task: to write a series that isn’t a series, where each story is a standalone that doesn’t actually stand alone. Conventional wisdom says there are two kinds of sci-fi readers: the ones who prefer series where many books carry a single plotline to its conclusion, and those who prefer books that wrap everything up between page one and “The End.”
With The Calling Void, I’m doing both. I tell people Tantalus Depths is a standalone, and it is. If you read that book, you’re not getting a cliffhanger ending, and you don’t need to read anything else first for homework. It is very much its own story. So is “Neurophage,” “Countermeasures,” “Empire of Salt,” and every other story I’ve written. You can read any of them alone, and you’ll have a complete story, with a beginning, middle, and end.
But there’s another story. A bigger one, too big to be told in one book. And that is the story of The Calling Void. The series itself has a narrative of its own, one that you’ll only see if you read each of these stories together. There are threads that weave in and out of time and space: characters who come and go, worlds that change characters and are changed by them. There’s a butterfly effect at play, as events from one story affect the world of the next. Sometimes obviously, otherwise not.
If you read “Breach,” you’ll find a self-contained story about two women fighting for survival in open space when their ship is destroyed by space pirates. If you read “Countermeasures,” you’ll find an equally self-contained story about mercenaries meeting an agent of a shady crime lord named Descartes after a heist on the moon. But if you read both, you might catch the detail that a specific scientist the mercenaries were supposed to kill in “Countermeasures” just happened to be on the ship destroyed by pirates in “Breach.” Funny coincidence, that. Almost like it wasn’t a random pirate attack after all. Almost like Descartes has a lot more control over his loose ends than he lets on.
My stories reference the Corsica Event: the near-extinction-level apocalyptic event caused by a hyperintelligent AI that mars the end of Earth’s 21st century. The specter of the Corsica Event looms over protagonist Mary through the entire plot of Tantalus Depths as she contends with another cunning AI named SCARAB. In “Empire of Salt,” we meet Masuyo Kosawa, who lived through the Corsica Event and profited from it, but was undone by a rival who reverse-engineered a piece of Corsica technology and changed the course of human history. In “Reliquary,“ we meet Gordon Craddock, a deranged cultist who worships that AI and rejects his own humanity. In my newest story, “Basilisk Whispers,” we meet a scientist who studies Corsica tech and witness firsthand the toll it takes on his sanity as he studies the mind of a machine god.
I haven’t shown the Corsica Event itself in any of my stories, and I don’t know if I ever will. Even if I do, it’s too big a cataclysm for one story to convey its scale completely. But its effects on Earth and other worlds, on the lives of the characters in each of my stories, they imply its significance. Fifty, sixty, eighty years after it happened, the Corsica Event is at the forefront of humanity’s collective memory.
Exotech Industries, the amoral megacorporation responsible for faster-than-light space travel technology, is a fixture in almost every story in The Calling Void. We learn their origins in “Empire of Salt,” but we see the true scope of their greed for power, wealth, and dangerous knowledge in Tantalus Depths, “Reliquary,” and “Basilisk Whispers.” In some stories, Exotech is just set dressing: an entity relegated to the background and present only due to sheer ubiquity. But the more you see behind the scenes, the more the mention of Exotech in a story carries a sinister weight of its own.
I could go on. I could talk about the slow tragedy of the Samrat Gem Rush and the generations of hapless souls doomed to lives of meager survival on a hostile desert world. I could talk about the mysterious lack of planets in the Mahatma system or the conspicuously sparse alien life on Samrat, Hayden, and Showalter. I could talk about the call of the void.
But I’ve already been doing that for years. The story of The Calling Void grows with each novel and short story, and even though each of those is a complete narrative of its own, they combine into a greater story. It’s a dark story, of a galaxy not meant for human survival, of apocalyptic machine gods, world-devouring alien menaces, foolish humans toying with threats out of hubris, ignorance, or madness. But it’s also a story of hope, of brave individuals overcoming unthinkable perils, persisting in the face of despair, staving off annihilation one breath at a time.
There are many twists, turns, and surprises in the Calling Void, and I hope to keep them coming for years to come.