Ama is two days from starting her graduate program when she pulls off a Wyoming highway to rest her eyes. She wakes on bare earth beneath unfamiliar stars. Her car is gone. The highway is gone.
The world she's fallen into looks like Wyoming – the Red Desert, the Great Divide Basin, sage and sandstone – but it runs on different rules. People here develop capabilities: moving water, heating stone, pushing air in ways physics back home can't explain. Those without capabilities survive on skill, trade, and instincts.
Esah, a young man from the Red Desert, awoke to the same situation not so long ago. He has begun to develop an understanding of the economy of survival – and the dangers – of this deeply familiar yet alien world.
What neither Ama or Esah understand is why people keep arriving. Or what happens to those who fail to adapt.
They soon will.
Splinter is a science fantasy novel set in an alternate Wyoming where elemental magic functions like physics and survival depends on knowledge as much as power.
Author Brian Moyer has crafted a sparse, sensory and land-rooted world in a narrative that blends the survivalist grit of The Martian with the immersive world-building of Hugh Howey's Wool.
Traditional high-fantasy ‘chosen one’ and ‘magic academy’ tropes are traded for a hard magic system governed by physics. This is a novel for fans of grounded fantasy; where the magic is logical and explainable.
This is also a meditation on identity, where both characters and landscapes are stripped bare, and where the reader is invited to interrogate what remains. It delivers deep emotional resonance, providing a sense of earned wonder to those who immerse themselves within the parallel world – a narrative in which your investment is more than returned.
From visceral descriptions of an alt-Wyoming landscape, to the tense struggle for survival in a home that’s no longer their own, Splinter explores the resilience of the human spirit within a world that is part fantasy, part dystopia, and all too familiar.
No explicit content. No profanity. Just the world.
Genre: Fantasy
The world she's fallen into looks like Wyoming – the Red Desert, the Great Divide Basin, sage and sandstone – but it runs on different rules. People here develop capabilities: moving water, heating stone, pushing air in ways physics back home can't explain. Those without capabilities survive on skill, trade, and instincts.
Esah, a young man from the Red Desert, awoke to the same situation not so long ago. He has begun to develop an understanding of the economy of survival – and the dangers – of this deeply familiar yet alien world.
What neither Ama or Esah understand is why people keep arriving. Or what happens to those who fail to adapt.
They soon will.
Splinter is a science fantasy novel set in an alternate Wyoming where elemental magic functions like physics and survival depends on knowledge as much as power.
Author Brian Moyer has crafted a sparse, sensory and land-rooted world in a narrative that blends the survivalist grit of The Martian with the immersive world-building of Hugh Howey's Wool.
Traditional high-fantasy ‘chosen one’ and ‘magic academy’ tropes are traded for a hard magic system governed by physics. This is a novel for fans of grounded fantasy; where the magic is logical and explainable.
This is also a meditation on identity, where both characters and landscapes are stripped bare, and where the reader is invited to interrogate what remains. It delivers deep emotional resonance, providing a sense of earned wonder to those who immerse themselves within the parallel world – a narrative in which your investment is more than returned.
From visceral descriptions of an alt-Wyoming landscape, to the tense struggle for survival in a home that’s no longer their own, Splinter explores the resilience of the human spirit within a world that is part fantasy, part dystopia, and all too familiar.
No explicit content. No profanity. Just the world.
Genre: Fantasy
Visitors also looked at these books
Used availability for Brian Moyer's Splinter