What if the great explorers of the Renaissance had set out west and discovered that the world was flat? What if beyond our familiar oceans lay an ominous grey plain that stretched forever, locked in permanent twilight? This is the world of The Cloven Sun.
It is 1973, a time of great industrial expansion. Winston Spears, a low-ranking spy in the English Empire, finds himself ordered aboard a doomed hovercraft expedition to explore the Magellanic Expanse—that vast, unknowable emptiness beyond the seas. A young, troubled man, uncomfortable in his career, Winston lacks the means to get the order overturned.
Sir Harold Bramfort, the expedition’s eccentric leader, believes that other islands of habitability lie within human reach somewhere in that great plain—an opinion not shared by his peers. The Expanse’s dangers are renown. Beyond the life-giving energy field created by the Arctic and Antarctic nodes, nothing can live. Familiar field effects such as day and night don’t happen. A death-like torpor awaits all who enter unprotected. Bramfort cares not. His scientist lover Agnes Finch has convinced him that his expedition can succeed, and has shown him how.
What Bramfort does not know is that his expedition will lead him directly to Vith, the sinister kingdom ruled by the mysterious Glass King. Agnes has unwittingly become an agent of Vith, and subtly manipulates Bramfort’s every move. After tragically mistaking Agnes for the Swiss spy he was sent to catch, Winston finds himself lost overboard in the Magellanic Expanse with nothing to sustain him but a crate of beer and box of crumpets. Thousands of miles from home, and surrounded on every side by life-sucking desolation, his chances of survival are almost nil.
Will Winston survive the Expanse? Will Lord Bramfort's expedition be captured by the Glass King, paving the way for the invasion of the world by the Vithian hordes? Only by equiring further about The Cloven Sun can you hope to find out!