The Nova Incident began here. Today, it becomes a book.

From Substack prequel arc to published book

Dark Matter: The Nova Incident is now live on Amazon Kindle as Book 0 of the series.

This story originally appeared here on Substack as a short serialized prequel exploring humanity’s first encounter with the artificial intelligence vessel Nova after centuries in deep space. Along the way, many of you helped the project grow through comments, likes, restacks, reviews, theories, and conversations around the story and its ideas. I’m genuinely grateful for that support.

The Kindle edition brings the full story together as a single uninterrupted read, along with a preview of Chapter 1 of Dark Matter.

The story sits somewhere between hard sci-fi and philosophical fiction. It’s less a story about humans versus machines, and more about different forms of intelligence trying to understand risk, control, survival and trust.

And once again, Marta Dec created the cover art, with feedback from many of you here on Substack helping shape the final version.

It’s very rewarding to see something that began here on Substack as a short story (Turing Test, the original Chapter 1 of Dark Matter) slowly evolve into a growing book series beyond the platform.

Thank you to everyone who has followed the project so far and been part of that journey!

And if you already read The Nova Incident here on Substack and would like to support the series in this new phase, leaving a short Amazon review genuinely helps more than most people realise.

Warmly,
Bruno Rothgiesser
darkmatterstory.com