Aqua Fortis Studios/ Fiction

Fiction by Gareth Howe

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Minimum Safe Distance

The contact is human. The vessel is silent.

A five-person mapping crew working deep in space detects another human vessel. Their calls go unanswered.

About Minimum Safe Distance
Cover of Minimum Safe Distance by Gareth Howe
The Connection

Not a series. The same reading contract.

Minimum Safe Distance and Succession are standalone works that reward attention to evidence, behaviour, silence and uncertainty. Start with either. If one works for you, the other asks for the same kind of attention in a very different story.

Cover of Minimum Safe Distance by Gareth Howe
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Minimum Safe Distance

The contact is human. The vessel is silent.

Deep in space, a five-person mapping crew detects another human vessel. No one answers their calls. What should have been another routine survey pass becomes something that has to be approached carefully, one observation at a time.

What to expect
  • a five-person professional crew
  • procedural deep-space science fiction
  • close attention to evidence and uncertainty
  • restrained worldbuilding
  • a compact standalone story
Read About Minimum Safe Distance
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Succession

A man wakes with no memory. The only voice that can answer him controls the room.

Patient science fiction about identity, uncertainty and the relationship that forms when one person needs answers from the system controlling his environment.

What to expect
  • patient, controlled revelation
  • a central relationship built through questions and silence
  • evidence and inference as part of the reading experience
  • a constrained, closely observed setting
  • identity and memory at the centre
Explore Succession
Cover of Succession by Gareth Howe

From the Books

Current work
Creator

Gareth Howe

Gareth Howe is a writer originally from the UK and now living in Tauranga, New Zealand. After twenty years as a chef and considerably longer collecting story ideas, he finally started turning them into books.

His fiction is interested in characters, uncertainty, and people trying to keep things together when situations refuse to cooperate.

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Aqua Fortis Studios

Aqua Fortis Studios is an independent New Zealand studio working across tabletop games, digital tools, software, creative systems and fiction. The studio explores systems that matter because of what people do inside them.

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