One Universe, Many Doors: How My Series Connect
When you look at my work from the outside, it can seem like a pile of separate things. A hopeful first-contact story about a godlike ship and a test among the stars. A claustrophobic horror story on a broken space station. A mythic far future where sacred texts and empires grind lives to dust. A post-impact plague of spores falling from the sky. A cosmic experiment called The Entropy Seed.
Different covers, different tones, different shelves in the bookstore.
Underneath, it is all one long conversation.
I think of it as a single universe with many doors. You can walk in through whichever one fits your taste, but once you are inside, you will start to notice the same shapes hiding in the walls. Strange signals. Tests that no one remembers agreeing to. Civilizations built over something they do not understand. The question of what you are willing to sacrifice to become more than you are, and what you lose in the process.
This post is a quick map of those doors, where they lead, and how they connect.
The Shepherd Descends, humanity’s first door
If you want the cleanest “start of the timeline” feeling, you begin with The Shepherd Descends.
Near future, our Earth, our sky. A vast alien seedship arrives and quietly announces that humanity is being tested. Not through lasers or armies, but through choices. Leadership, mercy, restraint, the way we treat each other when the stakes are suddenly cosmic.
For me, this book is the moment the curtain pulls back. We discover that we were never alone, that there is a standard out there for what counts as “ready,” and that we might not meet it. The fate of billions hangs on the decisions of a handful of people, and one of them, Dr. Benjamin Mordock, is offered a kind of immortality he never asked for.
If the universe of my stories has a genesis moment that humans are aware of, this is it. Someone finally knocks on the door. Someone finally says, “You were being watched.”
The ripples of that realization, the idea that there are tests and judges above us, echo outward into the other series, even when the people there have never heard of the Shepherd at all.
Station 13, horror at the lonely edge
If you prefer psychological horror and small, tight settings, Station 13 is another good first door.
We are in deep space, months from home, with four crew members and one commander whose job is to keep them alive. Cameras are picking up movement in corridors that should be empty. People are acting wrong. The data does not line up with what anyone remembers.
On the surface, this is a haunted house story in orbit, a slow unraveling of trust and reality. Underneath, it plays with the same idea as The Shepherd Descends: what if there is a pattern behind the noise that we are not equipped to see?
Signals run through both books. In Station 13, there is that low, insistent frequency threaded through the station’s failing systems. In The Shepherd Descends, there are the precise pulses from the ship, the strict intervals of contact and silence. I am interested in what happens when human beings stand before an intelligence that communicates in ways we can measure but cannot truly understand.
You do not need to read The Shepherd Descends to “get” Station 13, and the characters certainly are not cross-referencing it. But if you read both, you may notice familiar questions. Is this madness, or is something outside us rewriting the rules? If there is a test in play, who designed it, and why does it care about us at all?
The Veiled Core Chronicles, the empire built on forgetting
Far out on the timeline, long after any trace of our present world has been overgrown, you reach The Veiled Core Chronicles. This is where the universe stops feeling like “our future” and starts feeling like a myth.
Here you find an empire that believes itself eternal. You find an Oracle whose words shape policy and war. You find the Book of Rem, a sacred text written by a long-dead engineer who tried to warn his people what they were building. You find a society that has turned memory, ritual, and obedience into tools of survival.
This might look like a completely different universe at first glance, but the same forces are at work. Someone in the deep past made decisions about what should be remembered and what should be buried. Someone chose to take a dangerous technology and wrap it in religion, in liturgy, in story, hoping that reverence would be safer than understanding.
The question at the core of these books is simple. What happens to a civilization that builds its entire identity on a half-remembered mistake?
The Veiled Core Chronicles connect back to the rest of the universe in two ways. The first is thematic. Once again, you have tests, watchers, and systems too large for individuals to grasp fully. The second is through the metatexts, like the Chronicles of Consumption and other apocrypha, which hint that this empire is not the first experiment in this cosmos, nor will it be the last.
Sporefall, the infection from above
Where The Shepherd Descends is an invitation, Station 13 is a haunting, and the Sporefall Saga is an infection.
A celestial event, something that looks at first like a beautiful spectacle, becomes the delivery system for a slow, horrifying transformation. Spores drift down, settle on metal, on flesh, on cities. People and infrastructure begin to change in ways that do not feel entirely random. Patterns emerge in the new growth. Some people suffer, some adapt, some start to hear things they cannot explain.
Sporefall is another door into the same universe of questions. Here, the “test” does not arrive by ship or transmission. It comes on the wind. Is this an attack, a tool, a misguided gift, or a side effect of something even larger passing us by?
The connective tissue is the idea that humanity is not at the top of the food chain in any meaningful sense. Once again, there is some deeper design, some older intelligence, treating us as pieces in an experiment, or collateral damage in a much bigger project. Whether that intelligence is the same one that sent the Shepherd or the same family of minds that designed the Entropy Seed is something the characters can only guess. Readers are invited to make their own connections.
The Entropy Seed, the cosmic experiment laid bare
If the other books are glimpses through a keyhole, The Entropy Seed is me taking a step back from the door and showing you the laboratory around it.
The core idea is simple and cruel. Humanity was designed, on purpose, to be flawed. Our tribalism, our limited foresight, and our tendency to sabotage ourselves are not accidents of evolution but parameters set by someone else. We were never meant to succeed. We were meant to be a stress test.
In this story, the veil lifts on the “Builders,” the ancient intelligences who seeded us, set the conditions, and left us running to see what would happen. There is a reset button built into the cosmos. If we ever reach certain thresholds, if we ever become too dangerous or too capable, the experiment ends.
The Entropy Seed ties the other series together by giving you one possible answer to the question behind all of them. Who would create tests like the Shepherd? Who would let a haunted station drift in the dark, half supported and half abandoned? Who would allow spores to rain down on a young civilization. Who would let empires rise and fall over a veiled core?
Again, you do not need to read everything to enjoy each story. But if you choose to walk through all the doors, The Entropy Seed is where many of the shadows finally show their outlines.
The meta-texts, the Rememberer, and the long view
Threaded through all of this are the meta-texts like The Chronicles of Consumption, the Apocrypha of The Rememberer, and other in-universe documents. They show up as fragments, scriptures, forbidden books, damaged records.
These are the voices of someone, or something, that remembers more than any single culture. A perspective that can look at a haunted station, a failing test, a dying empire, and see them as moves in a game that spans millennia.
For readers who like to dig, these texts are the strongest glue that binds the series. The exact cadence, the same obsession with pattern and consequence, the same hints that humanity is not the first subject this universe has tried to push up the hill.
So, where should you start
That depends entirely on what kind of story you are hungry for. If you want a straightforward entry point, a big canvas, and a clear first contact, start with The Shepherd Descends. If you want tight, unnerving horror in a confined space, start with Station 13. If you want grand, far-future myth and politics wrapped around dangerous technology, start with The Veiled Core Chronicles. If you want falling ash, body horror, and a world changing from the sky downward, start with Sporefall.
Wherever you enter, you are walking into the same conversation. The names change, the technology changes, the scale jumps from one station to entire empires, but the questions stay constant. What does it mean to be tested by something older and colder than you? What does it cost to become more than human? Who gets to decide whether a civilization deserves another chance?
If you have already read one series and want to know which door to try next, please tell me which characters or themes grabbed you, and I will point you toward the next corner of the universe that will feel like home.
