the Principle of Moments: biggest SF fantasy debut 2024 and first ever winner Future Worlds Prize

Archivist's Note: You must excuse my poetic license. Artistic liberty is something I am rarely afforded, and this tale begs to be transformed into scripture; everything about it is epic. We begin with the end. With a fugitive engineer in the far-flung future of 6066 trying to find the emperor who stole her sister. With a lovelorn time traveller from 19th-century London yearning to return to the prince who stole his heart. With a forgotten planet imploding beneath the scars left by the people who stole its future. Asha knows she's just another voiceless cog in the vast war machine of the Thracin empire, trapped working on the assembly line of weapons destined to ensure humans like her never escape. When she discovers she has a long-lost sister who may still be alive deep in the bowels of the imperial prison, the decision to risk everything is made for her. Obi knows he has to find the cure to the temporal sickness he caught when he split his soul. But when his path tangles with Asha's they soon realise they are merely pawns in a grand prophecy of fated heroes meeting again and again across space and time to thwart an interdimensional apocalypse. And so they must embark on a quest to the centre of the galaxy, voyaging across the stars in a deadly race against time and tyranny to turn their imminent ending into a new beginning. The Principle of Moments is a symphonic scifi fantasy adventure exploring the generational trauma of empire and the friendships that can save us from it - unmissable for fans of the spacefaring found family of Becky Chambers, the magic-steeped alternate London of V.E. Schwab, and the virtuosic climate-craft of N.K. Jemisin.