The Signal and the Ribbon

Since 1920, commercial radio stations have been hard at work in the United States sending out news, music, weather forecasts, and sports play-by-play. At night, many of the strongest signals can be heard from hundreds of miles away.

But how strong does a signal have to be to reach the edge of the solar system? A nearby star system? The end of the galaxy? What if your goal is to transmit information across the entire universe? How would you go about it?

A being named Erom spent a lot of time thinking about that ten billion years ago and came up with a solution.

Persius narrates book 10 of the Voided Man. In this volume we learn:

About Persius' romance with Gemini when he was a young man...

How Good King John and his virtual version get along...

What it's like to live on an odd planet that is tidally locked to its star and can only be inhabited along a narrow band of twilight...

About the most uncommon cycle race in settled human space...

Who Erom is, why he went to the trouble to try to send radio waves across the universe, and whether he was successful...

And why you should always read the fine print when renting a car, whether the vehicle hovers or not.

All this and much more in The Signal and the Ribbon.