THE LONG WAKE

Most of its population spends the journey in long-duration stasis, waking only for successive Watches when the mission needs their knowledge, labor, or judgment. Every awakening may happen in a different era of the voyage. The same hull endures, while the people, sectors, institutions, and pressures around them change from decade to decade. Holdfast is neither a utopian starship nor a permanent disaster. It is an aging industrial machine whose systems, repairs, and past decisions leave physical and institutional traces for the Watches that follow. Distance stays fixed; reachability does not. A sealed sector may return to human use after decades. A person may go to sleep young and wake into a world where others have lived through entire decades. Every story takes place aboard the same vessel, but in a different time, place, and set of pressures. THE LONG WAKE is an adult science-fiction anthology blending hard-ish SF, procedural tension, exploration, engineering, horror, and the human cost of discontinuous time. Same hull. Different era. Different sector. Different people. Different pressure.