Cantos of Arcadia
Do you love dystopian fiction?
Think deep state AI conspiracies are fascinating?
Want another novel like That Hideous Strength but for our times?
You’ll love this new sci fi novel written in the tradition of the Inklings.
It promised salvation. It delivered only doom.
When Ansel Horowitz stumbles on a solution to Earth’s energy crisis, he’s ecstatic—at first.
But soon reality sets in: the solution didn’t come from Ansel’s own genius, or even from his AI partner. No, the solution to the world’s potential doom has come from a shadowy entity, origin unknown. And salvation comes with a condition: the entity wants a body of its own. It wants to live, even if it means hijacking someone else’s body to do it.
Ansel fights the entity, but humanity—overjoyed to have a solution to its greatest threat—doesn’t look twice. Soon, a golden age begins: poverty is obliterated, our energy debt wiped out. It’s a dream…
…that becomes a nightmare when the entity triggers a massive volcanic explosion: an extinction-level event that forces humanity to take refuge underground.
Apocalypse threatens. Humanity is on the brink. Blood cults rise, worshiping a dark goddess who demands nothing less than the extinction of mankind—and the ritual sacrifice of Ansel Horowitz.
But Ansel has vanished, searching for the one thing that can stop what he believes to be an alien/AI hybrid that will stop at nothing to achieve immortality, even if it means ending all life on Earth.
The stage is set. The stakes are infinite. And only one man knows the secret that will either save the world… or destroy the universe.
Sample My Work
Read Chapter One
"When asked about it in his later years, Ansel Horowitz claimed to have no memory of the morning that he saved the world…"
Dark Matter is chapter one of Cantos of Arcadia, but it can also be read as a stand-alone story.
Praise from Readers
Back to Tradition
"So much modern fantasy relies upon earlier works in the genre, on conventions and tropes set up by earlier writers, by games and so forth... Kotar gets back to the traditions that so many of those earlier writers drew upon -- mythology and folklore -- and collects water straight from the source."
Christopher Ruocchio
Internationally award-winning author of the Sun Eater series
A Brilliant New Voice
"Blending European folklore and epic fantasy, Kotar is a brilliant new voice in speculative fiction!"
Miles Cameron
Bestselling author of Artifact Space
Meet Nicholas Kotar
Nicholas Kotar is the author of the award-winning epic fantasy series Raven Son.
Now Nicholas is bringing his enchanting storytelling, rooted realism, and spiritual insights to a new genre: sci-fi.
Nicholas writes for readers who love classic fantasy like The Lord of the Rings and classic sci-fi like That Hideous Strength, and who aren’t afraid of a little darkness and honesty about the human condition. He also writes for seekers after truth and beauty (like himself), and for those who feel trapped by modernity, with a fresh take on traditional values and storytelling.
At the core of all of his work is a fervent belief that telling, writing, watching, listening to, and reading good stories may be the most important thing you do with your life.
Nicholas is writing to you from cow-country New York, where he conducts a seminary choir and pretends to homestead with his wife and four children.
For me, space has always been a place of light and story and limitless "maybes."
As his space trilogy attests, that’s exactly what it was for C.S. Lewis, and that’s exactly what it was for everyone steeped in an older understanding of the cosmos.
So you can imagine how unsatisfied I am with so much of modern sci fi, which tends to follow a completely materialistic view of seeing space as a vastness of nothing. A darkness so great that it makes a single human life seem insignificant.
It’s time to redeem that bleak modern version of space with new stories from the planetarium of my childhood. Stories where the light of the stars is only a hint at the exciting potential of all that we have not yet seen or explored or discovered out there in the vast ocean of space.
It's time for a new kind of sci-fi vision, full of light and hope and reaching toward the infinite. An infinite that is not indifferent to me or to you but has its own will and purpose.
I'm so excited to introduce Cantos of Arcadia, the first novel in my new sci-fi story world.
