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Believable Characters
In H1 L1 A0, the Earth is buckling under environmental collapse, overcrowding, and political failure as one man is faced with completing the only existing record of history that spans time and space. Where did the idea for this novel come from?
I believe that most ‘thinking people’ would view the status of our planet with some concern. Just as we seem to be having some common sense prevail in the political spheres, we have these mammoth “Data Centres” being created. These, actually unnecessary additions to our planet, are power-hungry, heat-producing, and pointless. They are needed because too many people are too lazy, so they ‘look stuff up’ online. Corporations are looking for cheaper ways to get our money. So, the – perhaps totally unnecessary Artificial Intelligence systems – need vast repositories of information. Not traditional bricks and mortar libraries, which once built, only need power for lights and air conditioners. No need for huge banks of processors always running!
The novel opens in a moment of crisis and then stretches across centuries of memory. Why did you choose that framing device?
I thought that it might be good to write a positive book about Earth. An outcome which will never happen, sure, but a modern fairy-tale?
It seemed to me, as I started to think about the book, that I needed some logical source of information. I felt that a personal account might make the fiction appear a little less fictional. So the ‘hero’ needed to be actually involved in some way with the whole Earth-space-future situation. I felt that the reader might identify with a character’s personal challenges during this fictional period. He needed to be ‘ordinary’ at first, but then as the story developed he became Abel to span the many years the story spans.
How important was it to you that the characters feel like real people rather than just vehicles for ideas?
While the characters are fictional, I like to think that they have believable characters with positive attributes, but with flaws. Superheroes don’t fit with the ‘reality aspects’ of the story.
What do you hope readers take away about the future of Earth after finishing the book?
Perhaps there might be readers who haven’t thought a lot about the parlous state of our home planet, and they might reflect on what they might be able to do to minimise their own impact, without losing some of the pleasures of life.
I would like to think that there may be readers who get a better view of the Earth and its place in our solar System, and the place of our Solar System in the immense Universe. For readers who may not have wondered about our place in the Universe, some of the facts – sizes, distances, speeds, places – used in the story might impress them and make them wonder about what might be out there!
But, closer to home, maybe some might think a bit more about what they might do to minimise ‘global warming’. Each person can only do tiny, tiny things, but if enough of us do these, it might make a difference. Involving the issues of ‘global warming’ in the story wasn’t actually needed for the storyline, but including it didn’t harm the underlying story. Does it add some veritas to the tale?
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In a future scarred by environmental collapse, overconsumption, and political paralysis, former RAF Group Captain James Kidd is drawn into a last-ditch survival programme: the construction of vast space habitats in the Asteroid Belt, designed to preserve human civilisation when Earth can no longer sustain it.
But the mission changes everything.
A mutated virus grants James and a handful of others dramatically extended lifespans, transforming them from soldiers into centuries-old witnesses to humanity’s darkest era and its most extraordinary recovery. When an alien vessel arrives in the outer solar system, first contact brings not invasion but an uneasy, transformative alliance that will propel James and his crew beyond the Milky Way and into the Andromeda Galaxy.
Told by James himself, dictating his life story as his lander spirals toward a crash on an alien world, H1 L1 A0 is a sweeping hard science fiction novel that spans five hundred years, four extraordinary lives, and the question that defines them all: when Earth wasn’t enough, what did we become?
The first instalment in a planned twelve-novel series, H1 L1 A0 combines rigorous scientific world-building with a deeply personal story of love, loss, and survival across the centuries.
H1 L1 A0
H1, L1, A0 is a science fiction novel with a strong climate-fiction pulse, and at its core, it imagines a future where Earth is buckling under environmental collapse, overcrowding, and political failure, pushing humanity toward vast Ark-like space projects, strange new technologies, and eventually contact with alien forces. The story follows James Kidd, who tells much of it in the first person, beginning from a crisis point high above an unknown planet and then reaching back across centuries of memory, survival, and transformation. What stayed with me most was how the book tries to braid together personal memoir, planetary warning, military adventure, and big-idea speculative fiction into one long arc.
What I found interesting is that the novel doesn’t move like sleek, polished hard science fiction that’s obsessed with efficiency. It feels more talkative than that, more authentic, almost as if James is sitting across the table trying to tell me everything before time runs out. Sometimes that means the writing rambles, circles, and doubles back. But that same looseness also gives it a certain honesty. The book has a homemade intensity to it. I could feel the author wanting not just to entertain me, but to argue, warn, and remember. That choice gives the novel a rough sincerity I ended up respecting, even when I wanted a firmer editorial hand.
This is not shy fiction. It’s deeply concerned with climate damage, human selfishness, political cowardice, and the fantasy that someone else will save us. Even when the story opens outward into alien tech and deep-space possibility, the moral center stays pointed back at Earth. The novel keeps asking what kind of species creates brilliance and ruin at the same time. James, Charlotte, May, and Alexander help ground that question because they are not just symbols in a debate. They’re part of the machinery of the plot, but they also feel like the human anchors that keep the book from floating away into concept alone. And the ending note from the author makes the book’s purpose even clearer: this story may be speculative, but its anxiety about the planet is not.
I’d recommend H1, L1, A0 most to readers who enjoy idea-driven science fiction, especially fiction that mixes environmental warning, future history, and space adventure with an earnest, personal voice. Readers who like ambitious, talky, reflective sci-fi that cares more about the size of its questions than perfect polish will find a lot to engage with here. For me, it felt like hearing a long, urgent story from someone who has been carrying it for years and cannot quite let it go until he has said his piece. That gives the book its own distinct gravity.
Pages: 184 | ASIN : B0H5YHCQMJ
