Curiosity · Series guide
Transmission · Issue 01 · Series guide
Eight illustrated pages on the whole duology — both novels, the twenty-five-year-old research vessel, the six people aboard, the real astronomy behind WR 104, and the author. Read it here in the browser, or take the PDF with you.
The full guide in plain text — same content, readable without the PDF
They crossed eight thousand light years to answer a signal. It had been waiting for someone to come.
A dying star has been transmitting for two hundred years, and nobody answered. Curiosity follows an unlikely crew, an ageing research ship and a message official institutions would rather leave alone. At its heart is a first-contact mystery about whether humanity can listen before fear decides what the unknown must mean.
Jennifer Starzek lost her ship — and two hundred and fifty-three of her crew. The United Earth Agency wants her back to take a twenty-five-year-old research vessel across the galaxy and learn who is calling. Nobody aboard is a first choice; they have fifty-three days to cross, while pirates close over the outpost behind them.
‘Life support down to thirty-eight per cent. Shields at twenty-three per cent. More torpedoes incoming.’ Tactical Officer LeBrahm barely had time to finish her report when another volley of plasma torpedoes crashed into the starboard hull.
Four hundred years before Curiosity ever left dock, something else came to WR 104 asking the same question. It never left.
Now the crew must enter a structure the size of a world and decide whether the intelligence inside is offering contact, issuing a warning, or preparing something far worse. The conclusion turns a deep-space mystery into a test of what people do with knowledge nobody wanted them to find.
The overhead lights went from white to red, and everybody on the command deck was suddenly the same colour as everybody else, and the whites of their eyes were the only things in the room that were not.
Curiosity is a twenty-five-year-old, 95-metre class-two research vessel carrying six people towards WR 104. Its curved command centre, rounded armoured midsection and swept SLS nacelles give the vintage ship the bulky silhouette Colin Truman likens to a winged tortoise diving for its prey.
As the two approached, Truman could see that many of the hull plates were damaged or rusted or both and that a lot of the scientific instrumentation had seen better days. — ‘But I also think she is beautiful.’
Paired searchlights flank the command deck. Sensors, telescopes, particle detectors and a central antenna array crowd the hull. Inside: physical controls beside touchscreens, a spherical fusion reactor and the Alc drive at the ship's core.
Six people. One ageing research vessel. Fifty-three days of crossing — and nowhere to put anybody who breaks. Their skills may get Curiosity to WR 104; their private histories will decide what happens when it arrives.
Captain
A highly experienced former UEA captain who once commanded the Destiny and swore never to command again. She reaches Kappa-5 carrying survivor guilt and a damaged faith in her own judgement. Curiosity gives her another crew to protect — and another impossible decision to own.
UEA liaison / executive officer
A Mexican civil servant, family man and experienced negotiator who helped shape Kappa-5’s independence agreement. He has never served aboard a starship, yet must assemble the crew and represent the UEA. His real strength is keeping six incompatible people moving in one direction.
Chief engineer
A towering, quiet engineer from Luther Island, Georgia, with a gift for making failing machines work. He built UEA research ships before wartime designs replaced laboratories with armour. Curiosity’s twelve-day refit is the challenge that brings him back to the work he loved.
Ops / comm / linguistics
A Kent-born autistic linguist of Algerian and Ugandan heritage who grew up speaking four languages. His eidetic memory, Vok’Chim research and working translation prototype make him uniquely qualified to question the WR 104 signal — and the institutions trying to control it.
Pilot
A French-Canadian pilot with seven years’ experience, cutting humour and formidable nerve. She has already pushed a ship beyond its limits and flown through an asteroid belt to save lives. Her refusal to value rank above people makes her brilliant at the helm and difficult to command.
Ship’s doctor
A calm, compassionate physician raised in the isolationist Shin Nihon colony on Mars. Personal loss drove her towards medicine and away from a community that rejected modern technology. Small in stature but authoritative under pressure, she is the crew’s medical and moral centre.
WR 104 is a genuine colliding-wind binary in Sagittarius: an evolved, carbon-rich Wolf–Rayet star in orbit with a hot OB companion. Both stars shed powerful winds. Where those winds collide, compressed material can cool into dust; the orbit winds it outward into the system's extraordinary infrared pinwheel.
Modern spectroscopy measures an orbit of roughly 242 days. Wolf–Rayet stars are massive stars late in their evolution, and some are studied as possible precursors of core-collapse supernovae and long gamma-ray bursts. The real WR 104 is not confirmed as aiming a burst at Earth. In the novels, the system becomes the apparent source of a structured transmission.
The series sits between hard science fiction and space opera. Its most dangerous frontier is not simply distance, but interpretation: scientific truth versus institutional control, guilt versus second chances, and the moral cost of deciding that an unfamiliar voice must be a threat.
Gryx-OLik is Voctune, one of a hidden civilisation inhabiting immense caverns far beneath Earth's surface, where the planet's interior heat sustains their cold-blooded biology. An exonaut by temperament and calling, he refuses to accept that the world above — or the stars beyond it — should remain unknowable.
Patient, precise and radically non-human, Gryx brings geological knowledge, extreme longevity and a lifelong fascination with the sky. His curiosity turns the familiar history of Earth into one of the series' biggest mysteries.
Martin Cosgrove writes science fiction and fantasy and is from Merseyside, England. He has been a secondary school teacher for twenty-two years and holds a BA (Hons) in Spanish.
He grew up on 1990s Star Trek and counts Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke among his favourite writers. Curiosity is his return to long-form science fiction: two novels written as one continuous story and published together, so the whole journey is ready now.
Also by Martin Cosgrove — the Universal Matter books: The Destiny of Ethan King (2012) and KARA (2014).
