Helmsman: Book One of the Sojourner Saga (Paperback or Softback)

"After the aliens slaughtered all the other Sojourner monks, young Greymalkin was the last hope for the intragalactic expedition... but then they tossed the screaming apprentice helmsman out of the starship alone, into the void...."

A young Sojourner monk named Brother Greymalkin Thomas volunteers to go on a desperate quest in search of a lost trove of galactic secrets in the remote and deadly Eta Carinae star cluster, a violent alien realm that was once home to the Builders, an ancient civilization of godlike entities who left behind wondrous artifacts and feral cyborgs. Greymalkin will learn that throughout the Galaxy, information is power, and gaining access to secret information is the difference between survival... and death.

Helmsman is the first book of the Carinae Quest in the Sojourner Saga series, set in the distant future when humanity has long since colonized the stars and thousands of scattered civilizations have collapsed throughout forgotten regions of the Galaxy, becoming dying societies called the Bereft. Dedicated to aiding these collapsed civilizations, Sojourners are a scientific Order of interstellar monks. But after millennia seeking Bereft societies, the Order and their huge interstellar memory ark starships are faltering. Unless Greymalkin discovers the secrets of the Carinae, the Sojourner Order will fall, and with it, all of Humankind. Inspired by the Chinese classic Journey to the West, the Sojourner Saga novels are fast-paced adventures of ideas, set in an expansive interstellar future of human, alien, and cybernetic societies.

Dr. Martin Halbert is a librarian and digital library innovator whose career has featured decades of experimental work in developing research data repositories and collaborative institutional change projects. Halbert served as co-principal investigator for the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, one of the most prominent international sources of scholarly information for researching the history of trafficking in enslaved Africans, and was the founder of Educopia, a non-profit organization that promotes knowledge sharing and capacity building among research organizations, communities, and individuals. He served as dean of libraries at two universities, and is now a tenured professor. Most recently, he completed four years as a program director and science advisor for the U.S. National Science Foundation, where he worked on open science policy for the agency. This is his first novel.