Press Kit
THE ILLUMINATED ONES
Book One — A Forged Weapon
Shawn D. America
PRESS KIT
For media, booksellers and event organizers
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FACT SHEET
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Title
The Illuminated Ones, Book One: A Forged Weapon
Author
Shawn D. America
Genre
Literary science fiction · post-apocalyptic · dystopian
Series
Book One of five. Book Two, The Battle of the Planets, in progress.
Published
2026, independently published
Length
95,653 words · 86 chapters · 278 pages
Illustrations
14 full-page plates, 300 DPI, full bleed
Paperback
ISBN 979-8-18190-527-6 · 6" × 9"
Hardcover
ISBN 979-8-19214-360-5 · 6" × 9" case laminate
Text-only edition
ISBN 979-8-19334-0867 · 264 pages, no plates
Ebook
Reflowable, illustrated
Cover art
Arsal Khan
Interior art
Created with generative-AI tools and edited by the author
(disclosed on the copyright page)
Author location
Portland, Oregon
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THE HOOK
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Cover line
THE WORLD IS WAITING FOR A SAVIOR
One sentence, for a bookseller
"It's a literary post-apocalyptic novel about a being who saves the
world and then keeps it — and it's about the fact that we said yes."
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DESCRIPTIONS
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SHORT — 25 words
She arrived when famine and plague had both become too small a word.
She saved the world, and then she began to keep it.
MEDIUM — 100 words
She arrived when famine and plague had both become too small a word for
what was happening to us. She unmade a missile with her attention. She
reached into the soil of every field on Earth and took the death out of
it, everywhere, at once. And she took the face of a plain woman of
middle years, so a grieving species would have something it could love.
We said yes. We would have said yes to anything. Nobody asked what she
had paid to be able to stand there.
Sidus saved the world, and then she began to keep it — the arks, the
engineered daughters, the patient and unanswerable kindness of a being
who has done this before.
LONG — 250 words, for catalogue and retail listings
She arrived when famine and plague had both become too small a word for
what was happening to us. She unmade a missile with her attention. She
reached into the soil of every field on Earth and took the death out of
it, everywhere, at once. And she took the face of a plain woman of
middle years, so that a grieving species would have something it could
love.
We said yes. We would have said yes to anything. Nobody asked what she
had paid to be able to stand there.
Sidus saved the world and then began to keep it. The arks took the
willing first, and the offer reached even the deep places, gentle, down
the old emergency bands. She grew daughters to help her — engineered,
exact, replaceable — and when one of them started counting the arks
instead of tending them, she crossed a country herself, because she will
not let a hired thing do the worst work on the beloved.
And in a laundry down in the grey she found a washer-girl with ruined
hands who could look at her without flinching, and made that girl into a
weapon.
Sidus is not a tyrant. That is the difficulty. She is precise, and
tireless, and extraordinarily kind — and everything she has done, she
has done out of love for the thing she is keeping.
A Forged Weapon is the first volume of a literary post-apocalyptic
series about mercy administered at scale, the arithmetic of being saved,
and the one word a species forgot it still had. Told in eighty-six
chapters by more than twenty narrators — a hermit, a beekeeper, a
bureaucrat, a city, a god — it is a novel about what people agree to
when they are frightened, and what it costs them afterward.
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AUTHOR BIO
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SHORT — 25 words
Shawn D. America lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife, three
children, and dog Lucy. A Forged Weapon is his first book.
MEDIUM — 75 words
Shawn D. America is the author of The Illuminated Ones, a planned
five-book literary science fiction series. He wrote, illustrated and
published the first volume independently. He lives in Portland, Oregon
with his wife, three children, and a dog named Lucy. A Forged Weapon is
his first book; the second, The Battle of the Planets, is in progress.
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THEMES AND TALKING POINTS
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Consent under duress
A species agrees to be saved and cannot afterward locate the moment it
agreed. What is a yes worth when the alternative is extinction?
The benevolent tyrant
Sidus is genuinely kind, genuinely grieving, and demonstrably right
about a great many things. The novel refuses to let the reader off.
Refusal as the last freedom
Three characters decline to kill, and in each case the body decides
before the mind does. The novel never states its thesis; a character
does put the question, and then declines to answer it.
Paradise Lost in a mine shaft
A geologist gives a twelve-year-old girl Milton, and eleven years later
the poem is the mechanism of the book's central act.
The record as resistance
The surveillance state is a mind, so the only safe medium is paper. The
novel turns out to be a smuggled document, and the reader is not told
until the last chapter.
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SUGGESTED INTERVIEW QUESTIONS
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The novel opens on survival and withholds the apocalypse for two chapters. Why that order?
Sidus is given the best argument in the book. Was there ever a draft where she was more clearly a villain?
Twenty-plus narrators, most of whom appear once and never return. How did that structure come about?
The theme is never named on the page. Was that a rule from the start, or something you arrived at in revision?
Three characters refuse to kill, and all three refusals are physical rather than moral. What were you after?
Why Milton?
The book is illustrated. What do the fourteen plates do that the prose cannot?
You self-published a five-book literary series. Why not query it?
What was cut that you still think about?
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SPEAKING TOPICS
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Available for bookstores, libraries, festivals, book clubs and writing
groups. Twenty minutes reading, twenty minutes talk, twenty minutes
questions.
1 — "We Would Have Said Yes to Anything."
What a species agrees to when it is frightened, and what informed
consent means when the alternative is extinction.
2 — "The Kindest Possible Tyranny."
Writing an antagonist who is gentle, who is right, and who is doing the
worst thing in the book. Craft-forward.
3 — "Paradise Lost in a Mine Shaft."
How a 350-year-old poem became the mechanism of a modern novel's central
refusal.
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EXCERPT — CLEARED FOR REPRINT
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From Chapter 8, "The Convergence." Approx. 120 words.
Longer excerpts on request.
On the third day she let herself be seen. Not in a thousand places at
once, the way the mercy had come — that, I understand now, was the part
of her that is not bound by where a body has to stand. She chose a
single place, and a single shape, and walked out into the cameras as one
plain woman of middle years and middle height, so that a grieving
species would have a face it could love. And we loved it. God help us,
we had just been saved, and we were so grateful, and we never once
thought to ask the woman in the plain dark dress the only question that
mattered — which was not where she had come from. It was what she had
paid to be able to stand there in front of us at all.
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NEXT IN THE SERIES
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THE ILLUMINATED ONES
Book Two — The Battle of the Planets
The garden has a new keeper, and she is not her mother.
Noor was the reliable daughter — the one who never made the mother wait.
Now she holds the Earth, and the arks are still full, and every year the
lottery still runs, and the letters still come back from colonies nobody
has ever seen.
Asha has spent ten years counting those letters. She knows what the
numbers mean and has never said so out loud.
And somewhere under the ground, a ghost in the machine is opening doors.
Coming soon.
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MEDIA CONTACT
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talesmysterywonder@gmail.com
shawnamericaauthor.com
Cover images, sample plates, author photo and longer excerpts available
on request.
