Stellar Throne: Book One: The Catalyst

By Wajira Buddhika

Beneath the Terracotta Army, something has been waiting for five thousand years.

It was placed there in 3031 BCE. It woke in 969 CE. And in July 1969 -
the moment human beings first set foot on another world - it began to move.

Now it is 2147. Humanity has built the Solar Empress, the most powerful
artificial intelligence ever created. The orbital city of Continuum holds
the world's memory in lattices of light. The Encyclopedia of Human
Intelligence catalogs every breakthrough of the Glass Age. From every
angle, the human project looks like progress.

It was never progress. It was preparation.

When a geological survey team in Xi'an returns eleven days of readings
no instrument can explain, Lucas Hale is sent to investigate. A technician
who fixes machines by touching them, Lucas puts his bare hand against the
rock and understands immediately: this is not broken. This is working.

What follows draws together five people whose paths were never supposed
to cross - a man who remembers everything, a woman who rewrites the
genome, an orbital engineer tending the world's memory, a constructed
being placed beneath Arctic ice before AGI existed, and the technician
who introduced a deliberate flaw into humanity's most powerful computing
structure.

What they find beneath Xi'an will reframe everything humanity has built.
Every technology it is proud of. Every step it has taken toward the stars.

The most dangerous thing in the solar system does not know it is being used.

STELLAR THRONE is a science fiction series about the patience of darkness,
the cost of progress, and the specific kind of courage required when the
foundations of the human project reveal what they were always built on.

THE CATALYST is Book One.

For readers of Cixin Liu's THE THREE-BODY PROBLEM, Peter Watts's BLINDSIGHT,
and the long-horizon science fiction of Arthur C. Clarke and Stanislaw Lem.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GZBBFTRT
• ISBN13: 9798195163174
• Release Date: May 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 370 Pages
• Weight: 1.09 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.0"