Further: A Question That Led Us to the Stars

By Simon Wells

What happens when a young person asks what seems like an innocent question? What if the answer to that question led us to the stars?

In a housing commission flat in Logan, Queensland, sixteen-year-old Lachlan Voss stays up late running simulations on a second-hand laptop. He's supposed to be finishing a school project. Instead, he stumbles onto a fusion pellet configuration that the world's leading physicists have missed for decades.
Twenty-one years later, his daughter Tessa is inside Jupiter's atmosphere, her ship trapped in a density layer that shouldn't exist, forty-three minutes from help that can't arrive in time. The engine she needs to survive is the one her father designed in that bedroom-built from a question he refused to stop asking.
FURTHER is the story of how one simple question becomes a journey across generations. From a teenager's bedroom to the surface of the Moon, from Senate hearing rooms to the crushing depths of a gas giant, it traces the human cost of reaching for something larger than ourselves-the relationships sacrificed, the politics navigated, the lives given and taken by a universe that doesn't explain itself.
At its heart are the people who refuse to accept "impossible" a young physicist named Ananya Chandra who spends her life proving Lachlan's shapes are real; a senator named Claire Nakamura who fights budget battles in rooms that smell of coffee and carpet cleaner; a crew of miners and engineers who fly into Jupiter knowing that the speed of light will never let them call home in time.
And Tessa Voss, who learned to ask questions the way her father did-by never learning when to stop.
A novel of hard science, human ambition, and the price of the stars, FURTHER asks what we're willing to burn to get there, and who we become along the way.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GPPNJ7HJ
• ISBN13: 9798249391041
• Release Date: February 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 318 Pages
• Weight: 0.94 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"