Robert Baker

Robert Baker writes novels about ordinary people caught in the moment the rules stop holding. The Helios Cascade is his first series: standalone stories in many genres, each set in a world changed by the same impossible event.

Every Helios Cascade novel is told in first person and present tense, and stays that close on purpose. You find out what has happened when the narrator does — from inside one life, with no wider view to cut away to and nobody arriving at the end to explain it.

The morning at the centre of the series never changes and is never the whole story. Reality began to change, everywhere at once, in more worlds than anyone could count. Each novel is about what came after that morning in one of those worlds: who gets believed, who gets moved, and what still has to be paid for.

Which is why books that share almost nothing else belong in the same series. Most of them stand alone: each is set in a different world, written in a different genre, and finishes its own story with its own characters. The first three are the exception, one continuous story that begins with The Pruning, the only book that tells what really happened. The Long Dim is the other, a series of its own that starts with Firewood.