I've been canoodling with a new idea for a novel for literally months, and made several false starts at getting it going, but to no avail. I've decided that it's going to be one of the main projects that I center 2026's writing on (keeping in mind that I hate new years resolutions - it's not "2026's project", it's just "the project I started in 2026"). It's called Canticle of the Turning (tentatively), and I'm working on the dust jacket pitch. So far I've got this:

Hundreds of years ago, a calamity left the Earth rotating at 1/1000th its original speed. What we used to think of as a day now takes nearly 3 years. In order to survive, the last remaining bands of humans have gathered around the terminator - the line between light and dark. On this razor's edge between scorching and freezing, a community of just a few thousand remain, living on giant crawlers. They are led by the Mothers of the Turning, a secretive group of matriarchs that keep the path around the world locked in a never-ending song. It's the life's work of a Mother of the Turning to memorize this song to help keep the community safely navigating as the tiny habitable zone moves ever Westward.

The basic premise of this world is something that is tribal and post-apocalyptic. I want to use Biblical imagery, names, vibes, etc. to call back to the exodus of the Israelites, while also taking in elements of the Mongolian Khanates to help fill in the gaps for how such a harshly nomadic society would work. I am planning on focusing on the struggle between tradition and modernity as well as the pitfalls utilitarianism; I want the philosophical backbone of this book to be the conflict that arises when human lives are sacrificed for the assumed good of the group, only for their sacrifices to be in vain in the end.

The mechanics of living on the Terminator

I imagine this society living on the "sunrise line" of the terminator. That is, the West side of the terminator is in darkness and the East side is in full sunlight. Because the rotation of the Earth will be so slow, the "hot side" to the East will be absolutely scorching - surface temperatures of 300 or 400 degrees Fahrenheit are likely reasonable. On the cold side, temperatures of -100 or more are possible. I'm using Venus as a (more extreme) example here: it is closer to the sun and has a thicker atmosphere, so the comparison can't be as direct, but its surface reaches 800+ degrees, so I think the combination of a thinner atmosphere and extra distance from the sun makes my numbers at least pass a basic sniff test¹. Living on the sunrise side of the Terminator is thus extremely important because it means that radiant heat from the ground won't cook our society alive since that side will have just been exposed to the freezing cold of the extended night.

Another aspect of the weather around the terminator is the wind - the massive temperature differential means the wind will be blowing strongly from the cold side to the hot side, causing extreme wind chill in the darker areas and a constant, nearly impassable dust storm on the lighter side. This needs to be overcome using a combination of scraped-together technology and clever navigation, and also adds a significant element of danger to simply living day-to-day life.

Everyone in this society lives atop giant crawlers; these massive structures are basically tank-treaded platforms a hundred feet or so to a side, powered by batteries that are charged up on the hot side by giant solar panels. The further to the front you are, the colder it is, but the higher status you hold in this society. Towards the front are the Mothers of the Turning and other leaders, prominent scholars, and the "university" (of course, it's just a collection of crawlers where the thinkers think, but we'll call it the university for cheekiness). The middle of the pack are manufacturers of various goods such as clothing and materials to maintain the crawlers, artisans, etc. The rear of the group are where the sunlight harvesters (who tow long strands of solar panels to charge up huge batteries, which are delivered to the other rows of crawlers on a regular basis), farmers, and people who don't have any other place live. Each line has between twenty and a hundred or so crawlers, and they are spaced perhaps a quarter mile apart, with a total of thirty-ish rows and perhaps two thousand crawlers total.

Stratification of this society

The supreme importance of the Mothers of the Turning shapes how this polity functions: they have the key to everyone's survival, and to cement their own power they lead the caravan. They keep the directions the caravan must follow encoded in a thousand-day-long song, providing subtle adjustments to the lead crawlers to ensure they traverse the safest possible passage around the world. The survival of everyone flows from them.

However, there are many important elements of this society whose value is equal to the Mothers, even without their prominent social position. The Sunlight Harvesters, who occupy the rear of the caravan and are thus seen as least important, yet the batteries they constantly fill and refill and haul to the front of the caravan to be distributed to all the crawlers literally keeps everyone moving. Without them, everyone dies, and on a much faster time scale than if the mothers disappeared.

Another important group is the linemasters guild, a group of skilled spotters who live and work atop tall towers on small crawlers at the ends of each row. Their job is to maintain alignment with the mothers' crawlers at the front of the caravan using a system of signal lamps and (what are revealed to be) adapted gun sights to ensure the two ends of the line stay together, and the line stays parallel to the one in front of it. Without them, crawlers become misaligned and could drift far off course, using much more energy at best and getting completely separated at worst. The whole society lives on a knife's edge of having enough power to continue to move forward to safety, so any aberration in the linemasters' work can create an unrecoverable chain reaction.

I have many more details I want to dig into, but this is the basic vibe I am working with right now. I think there's a lot of potential in this story, and the mixing of elements from historical nomadic peoples with some relatively modern sci-fi ideas has the potential to be really fascinating.

Today's picture

This was taken outside my in-law's house on New Years Eve. I am playing around more with flash, especially using it to highlight foreground elements in dark scenes while letting the background develop on a long shutter. It certainly isn't perfect, but it's at least interesting, so I will take it as a win.