Mushrooming Time
Francesco Helios, a groundskeeper in New Shining Capital, runs a ‘mower,’ a seventy-ton leveling machine that keeps the Lawn free of the bloom of mushrooming monuments. Like an unruly yard, structures shove their way up through the turf: the obelisk of the Washerman Monument, the temple of '''Old Frog Face,’ and a thousand other stubborn relics from a half-recollected past that refuse to stay mowed down.
While Francesco is mowing, a ghostly woman appears on the Lawn. Unlike other human ghosts reborn from the past, the woman recognizes Francesco. She calls him by a name he doesn’t recognize, but that resonates. Timebreaker.
Soon Francecso is catapulted to dockyards cluttered with mushrooming battleships and across the country to plains of ghostly buffalo, all with a madman on his trail who seeks to transform Francesco into a ‘grubber,’ dedicated to the eradication of CAHSPEI—Chronologically Anomalous Human-Seeming Phenomenon (Emergent-Insubstantial)—that is, to the murder of human ghosts from the past.
Yet if the Timebreaker is real—and he is the one— then maybe even a lowly groundskeeper can save his family from ruin, himself from oblivion—and, in the process, wrench humanity from the suicidal rubber room of rebounding time his mushroom-haunted world has become.
Winner of the 2026 Ark Prize for best novel.
Genre: Science Fiction
Francesco Helios, a groundskeeper in New Shining Capital, runs a ‘mower,’ a seventy-ton leveling machine that keeps the Lawn free of the bloom of mushrooming monuments. Like an unruly yard, structures shove their way up through the turf: the obelisk of the Washerman Monument, the temple of '''Old Frog Face,’ and a thousand other stubborn relics from a half-recollected past that refuse to stay mowed down.
While Francesco is mowing, a ghostly woman appears on the Lawn. Unlike other human ghosts reborn from the past, the woman recognizes Francesco. She calls him by a name he doesn’t recognize, but that resonates. Timebreaker.
Soon Francecso is catapulted to dockyards cluttered with mushrooming battleships and across the country to plains of ghostly buffalo, all with a madman on his trail who seeks to transform Francesco into a ‘grubber,’ dedicated to the eradication of CAHSPEI—Chronologically Anomalous Human-Seeming Phenomenon (Emergent-Insubstantial)—that is, to the murder of human ghosts from the past.
Yet if the Timebreaker is real—and he is the one— then maybe even a lowly groundskeeper can save his family from ruin, himself from oblivion—and, in the process, wrench humanity from the suicidal rubber room of rebounding time his mushroom-haunted world has become.
Winner of the 2026 Ark Prize for best novel.
Genre: Science Fiction