The Culling Series

Why are you still alive, at the end of the world? What determines you so hard to survive, at the very end of the world? Can it be raw instinct, along with greed and revenge? Or can it be love, the sweet feeling of love to have emerged right now, right at the end, as an irony of life, to overwhelm you now in powerful feelings of joy and temptation, at the very end of the world?  The Culling unfolds now in death, chaos, loss, and destruction, and throughout these incredible events, Dickens, a young and highly aspiring poet, has to live his life moment by moment throughout the ever-present loss and exasperation of these atrocious times, while he is forced to experience it all through the intense feelings of his tender, sensitive soul. Carried throughout chains of unexpected events, Dickens discovers the incredible meanings and circumstances of the world at its end, not only through the brute need for survival present in everyone around, but he arrives to discover the consistent, true nature of life all around, perspective that he gains directly through his inquiring nature, perspective that he would have never achieved in a normal life. How far can Dickens hold on throughout his extraordinary encounters at the very end of the world and at the very threshold between life and death? You would never believe!

In a solar system where The Authority decides who lives and who dies, only one of their own executioners can stop them.   Glade Io is a trained killer. Marked at a young age as an individual with violent tendencies, she was taken from her family and groomed to be a Datapoint—a biotech-enabled analyst who carries out the Culling. She is designed to identify and destroy any potential humans that threaten the colonies: those marked as lawbreakers, unproductive or sick. But when she's kidnapped by rogue colonists known as the Ferrymen, everything Glade thinks she knows about the colonies, and The Authority that runs them, collapses into doubt.   Pulled between two opposing sides, and with her family's lives hanging in the balance, Glade is unsure of who to trust—and time is running out.

When everything she's ever known is a lie, one young woman must make a choice that could change the course of history.   Glade Io is torn between two worlds. She's a trained killing machine—selected by the ruthless Authority to be a Datapoint, a tech-enabled agent of the state who eliminates threats to the human colonies throughout the solar system in the Culling. But her time among rogue colonists called the Ferrymen has convinced her that The Authority has far more sinister plans in store, and all the justifications they fed to her are lies. Vowing to help the rebels fight The Authority from the inside, Glade must sabotage a captured Ferryman ship that The Authority  is planning to use to attack the Ferrymen stronghold.    Though Glade is drawn to the brave leader of the Ferrymen, Kupier, she has older loyalties as well. Her friend and mentor Dahn Enceladus is charismatic and ambitious, but although Glade cares for him, she can no longer trust him. Her younger sisters are also in danger of facing Datapoint testing, and now she's being forced into an upgrade she cannot refuse. But help is about to arrive in an unlikely form: a ghost from her distant past.

Torn in two directions, Glade must make one fateful choice—for herself, and the future of humanity.   Glade Io is a rebel. Having fled with her younger sisters to live among the Ferrymen, she knows there is no going back now. She is committed to the cause of overthrowing the brutal Authority, and she trains her new comrades in the art of combating Datapoints like herself—those tasked with the Ferrymen's destruction. Meanwhile Ferryman leader Kupier longs to travel the stars with Glade, free from constant war, but to do that he believes they must strike The Authority at its heart: the ancestral homeworld of Earth.    Glade is hesitant; she hopes taking out the Datapoints living on the Station will be enough. But when the time comes, Glade faces the specter of killing her former friends in cold blood and her former mentor, Dahn Enceladus, tells her that The Authority has eyes and ears within the rebel stronghold. Now Glade faces a dilemma: sabotage The Authority from within, or return to fight alongside the Ferrymen, possibly putting her sisters' lives in danger.