Fermi’s Progress – Chris Farnell's Website

Fermi's Progress

“The Fermi is the Earth's first and last faster-than-light spaceship. The last, because it turns out its engine vaporises entire star systems in its wake. And nobody knows how to turn it off.”

Fermi’s Progress is a sequence of four novellas about the Fermi, a ship cobbled together from obsolete cold war tech and cutting edge mad science, bouncing around the galaxy leaving a trail of obliterated planets in its wake. Each novella, released every three months, will see the Fermi arrive at a mysterious new world, encounter bizarre new alien cultures, and blow them up.

Find out more about the Fermi’s progress below, or order the Season Pass from Scarlet Ferret…

Dyson's Fear

The Fermi is Earth’s first faster-than-light capable spaceship. It’s also its last. The moment its engines engage, it unleashes a shockwave that vaporises entire planets, entire solar systems.
Fermi’s crew, the last surviving members of the human race, now find themselves circling an ancient Dyson sphere in a distant corner of the galaxy, where they must explore a city of ships and negotiate with a vast, lonely AI for their survival. But that isn’t their only problem.
Because the Fermi’s engines are powering up again…

Ken MacLeod

"Fermi's Progress is fresh, fun SF with a dark conceit, dangerous thought experiments, thrilling action adventures, and lots of wit and warmth."

Descartesmageddon

The Fermi's faster-than-light engines have destroyed the Earth, and an alien Dyson sphere, and its crew still have no idea how to switch it off. What's worse, as they reach a planet of sentient fungus, their supplies are already running low.

But this world has its own problems. People have been losing their souls, with the survivors huddling together in abandoned shopping malls as society falls apart. And when the Fermi's crew arrive they will discover something that will challenge their very idea of what it is to be human.

Nate Crowley

Author of Notes from Small Planets

"Simultaneously a tribute to the classic TV SF 'planet of the week' format and a very literal demolition job of the same - and so smart that it's never afraid to be silly. Brilliant stuff."

Planet of the Apiaries

Queen is a gas giant, where space-suited beekeepers tend enormous floating hives to extract the precious rocket fuel the giant bees manufacture within. The Fermi desperately needs that fuel if its crew don’t want to starve to death stuck on their ship, so they strike a deal. The Fermi will rescue some stranded beekeepers in exchange for a tank of fuel.

But things take no time to go wrong, and soon two of the crew are marooned in an increasingly hostile alien hive, while something has made it back to the Fermi….

Andrew Skinner

Author of Steel Frame

"Clever and strange, genre-bending and darkly funny, it’ll take you on a ride between myriad times and places, Fermi’s Paradox observed through the lens of interstellar call-centres like it was the grim spawn of The Dark Forest and Hitchhiker’s Guide, or the fleshy junction of Alien, Embassytown, and Office Space."

The Phone Job

The Greater Galactic Commercial Network spans the cosmos, using an advanced, time-warping communication system to contact other worlds and cultures, trading technology and knowledge for mineral and biological resources, all run from a single call centre at the top of a space elevator.

It’s the first sign of trans-stellar civilisation the Fermi has encountered.

It offers them hope.

It might even offer them the chance to save a world.

Just not this world.