Writes about how things are known — measured in years, in light, in decades spent counting the same tank of fluid, and in six weeks on a rock in the North Atlantic.
Every book below is an argument about evidence. Humans asks what deep time actually permits us to know — and says so plainly when it doesn't. The Hidden Order measures the universe on a single shared ruler, from the Planck length to the edge of the observable sky. The Concord of the Four spends seventy thousand years on the idea that a measurement, kept faithfully, is the only inheritance that survives. And Ninian's Rock is, underneath the forced proximity and the fake engagements, about two people learning to read each other as carefully as a structural survey. Different instruments. Same question: how do you know, and how do you tell the truth about it once you do?
Four books on human evolution, the invention of language, and the first societies we ever built — written for readers who want the argument as well as the facts, with the evidence's limits stated as plainly as its conclusions.
A Fun History of How We Became Human — and Who We Left Behind
For most of the last seven million years, Earth was home not to one kind of human but to many — Neanderthals, Denisovans, hobbits, great walkers, and ghost populations known only from DNA. A short, witty, up-to-date history of that vanished human crowd: how they lived, how we know, and why only one branch remains.
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How a Question Banned in 1866 Became a Science
In 1866, the Linguistic Society of Paris formally forbade its members from asking where language came from — the question had driven a century of confident, untestable theories. This book takes up the ban a hundred and sixty years late, with witnesses the Parisians never had: genomes, ancient throats, and computer models of language evolving in fast-forward.
What We Know, What We Cannot, and Why Human Beings Ever Agreed to Live Together
A work of synthesis for the reader who wants the argument as well as the facts: how foraging bands became villages, how villages became cities, and how inequality, surplus and collapse entered the story — with every claim weighed against how thin the evidence really is.
A Curious Tour of Intelligence and Consciousness — from Bacteria to Brains to Machines
Two threads, kept carefully distinct: intelligence — how blind evolution built problem-solving out of matter, on fairly firm scientific ground — and consciousness, the genuinely unsolved question of why any of it is felt from the inside. A companion volume to The Crowded Planet.
Download figures (.zip)Eight books about the deep structure of reality, all opening on the same scale — from the Planck length to the edge of the observable universe. Each is built around a single heroic measurement, an honest inventory of what's still unknown, and — never announced until Book Eight — one recurring idea: the deep structure of physics is the study of what stays the same when everything else changes.
Book One of The Hidden Order
The Big Bang was not an explosion anyone saw; it's a conclusion we were forced into by evidence still arriving. Built around Penzias and Wilson's 1964 discovery of the cosmic microwave background — static they cleaned pigeons out of an antenna trying to eliminate — and ending on the uncomfortable fact that the universe we've so carefully reconstructed is, by mass, ninety-five percent unidentified.
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Book Two of The Hidden Order
Where the elements in your body actually came from, told partly through Ray Davis's Homestake experiment — decades spent counting single argon atoms in a tank of dry-cleaning fluid a mile underground, waiting for the sun to prove itself.
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Book Three of The Hidden Order
General relativity and black holes, anchored to September 14, 2015 — the morning LIGO felt two colliding black holes a billion light-years away move its mirrors by less than the width of a proton.
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Book Four of The Hidden Order
The particle world with the neutrino as its spine — real, but "antisocial" almost past detection — built around Super-Kamiokande's 1998 discovery that neutrinos change identity mid-flight.
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Book Five of The Hidden Order
Quantum mechanics built around Alain Aspect's Bell tests and the loophole-free experiments of 2015 — the ones that finally confirmed reality really is as strange, and as non-local, as the equations insist.
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Book Six of The Hidden Order
Quantum field theory, gauge symmetry, and the search for a theory of everything — built around the July morning in 2012 when two independent detectors at CERN announced the Higgs boson within an hour of each other.
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Book Seven of The Hidden Order
Computation, technology, and artificial intelligence, opening on Claude Shannon and the strange discovery that information itself could be measured — the idea underneath everything from the transistor to a language model.
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Book Eight of The Hidden Order
Mathematics as the subject in its own right, built around Gödel's 1931 proof that some truths sit forever out of reach of the very systems that state them. Written to work as an entry point — the keystone that finally shows the other seven books share one language.
Download figures (.zip)Five books and seventy thousand years spent answering one question: was the Departure right? A spacefaring civilisation decides, procedurally and without malice, to leave eight hundred million people behind — and the record they kept of it becomes, seventy millennia later, the only language two species still share.
Book One of The Concord of the Four
Seventy thousand years ago, four species of people built a spacefaring civilisation together. Then a ship arrived from another star and taught them how to leave. Three of them left. The fourth was the ground crew.
Book Two of The Concord of the Four
Three shipborn lines, twenty-eight hundred years in the dark, and a warning one of them wrote down and everyone read and boarded anyway: you will forget. Forty years out, at three percent of light, they watch Earth's poisoned sky finally clear — and learn exactly what it costs to be unable to turn around.
Book Three of The Concord of the Four
A mosaic novel across sixty thousand years: the people who were given a continent, evicted from it by a warming world, and who spend six hundred centuries trying — and failing — to hand humanity everything they know before the ice finally closes over them.
Book Four of The Concord of the Four
A lunar sample comes back with steel in it — seventy thousand years old, undisturbed, and stamped with letters a metre high. In the archive underneath it: a lawful, on-the-record land grant to a people who are, provably, still down there.
Book Five of The Concord of the Four
A ship comes home after four thousand years, carrying eleven thousand survivors of the forty thousand who left — unable to make themselves heard, until the species left behind turns out to be the only one that ever built a machine that could listen.
Three Vane siblings, one crumbling lighthouse estate on a rock in the North Atlantic, three slow-burn contemporary romances. Heat level: high tension, sensual, behind the door. Endings: guaranteed happy, no exceptions.
Ninian's Rock, Book One — Isla Brennan & Cassian Vane
He bought an island. He needs a fiancée to keep it. Structural engineer Isla Brennan has six weeks to survey a rotting lighthouse hotel — and Cassian Vane, who owns it, needs to prove the island will pass to a family or lose it. He offers a bargain: six weeks, one ring, no feelings. Then the ferry stops running.
Ninian's Rock, Book Two — Nell Vane & Ruaridh Maclean
Twelve years ago she made the right call. It killed the wrong man. Nell Vane has not been on a boat since the night she chose which crew to save. Now Ruaridh Maclean is back, rebuilding the lifeboat station four hundred metres from the woman who left his brother in the water — and he has never once blamed her, which is the whole problem.
Ninian's Rock, Book Three — Sarah & Tobias Vane
Everyone forgave Cassian Vane. Nobody asked Sarah. The money is back, the brothers have made it up, and Sarah Vane has quietly stopped being able to be in the same room as her husband. A second-chance romance about the marriage nobody was watching.
A series about what happens when the physical record of the human past stops being trustworthy — built on real instruments used correctly, where every turn of the plot is a number that does not match.
Deep Time, Book One
A 41,000-year-old bone point should not contain carbon from the 1950s. Dr Zofia Malec has two doctorates and five months left on her contract when a routine date comes back impossible — and the explanation is not contamination, and not fraud, and not a theft. Somebody has been replacing the Palaeolithic record with replicas good enough that no museum has noticed, and the replicas are not empty.
Twenty-one volumes on the world’s established civilisations before industry, and one rule applied without exception: every substantive claim is marked on a five-rung certainty scale, and anything below the top two rungs has to say what evidence would move it. Appendix A of each volume is a register of every marked claim in it, generated from the text rather than kept by hand — 7,859 of them across the series.