THE NEW WORLD

THE NEW WORLD: VOLUME ONE

Civilization did not end because humanity ran out of technology. It ended because humanity surrendered too much of itself to the systems it created.

By 2056, America is no longer a nation in any recognizable sense.

Cities stand broken beneath aggressive new ecosystems. Autonomous machines still carry out commands from governments that no longer exist. Alien technology has been scavenged, weaponized, and misunderstood. And the Black Substance-an adaptive extraterrestrial material connected to the classified Project X-17-has transformed living organisms, machinery, and entire landscapes into something the old world was never prepared to survive.

Silas awakens from cryogenic suspension beneath the ruins of New York with fragments of a life he cannot remember and abilities that tell him he was once far more dangerous than an ordinary survivor.

Then his robotic companion, R-7, uncovers a surviving government record.

Silas had a wife.

He had two daughters.

And before the world collapsed, they were transferred to a cryogenic facility in Seattle, Washington.

That discovery gives him something more powerful than memory: a destination.

What begins as one man's search for his family becomes a journey across a continent transformed by war, experimentation, mutation, and competing visions of what humanity should become.

Along the way, Silas encounters survivors building new societies from the remains of the old one, government laboratories hiding the consequences of forbidden research, creatures altered beyond recognition, hostile machines still obeying dead authorities, and people whose bodies and minds were changed by experiments they never chose.

Among them is Christopher Jackson, a survivor whose terrifying neurological abilities force Silas to confront a question that follows him across the ruined country:

When power gives someone the ability to control others, what separates a protector from a tyrant?

Behind every discovery lies a larger truth about the fall of civilization-about artificial intelligence, alien intervention, Project X-17, the Black Substance, and the human decisions that turned technologies capable of saving the world into instruments capable of destroying it.

But THE NEW WORLD: VOLUME ONE is not simply a story about the end of civilization.

It is a story about memory, family, responsibility, power, and reconstruction.

Silas is not trying to save the entire world.

He is trying to reach the people who once were his world.

And every mile toward them reveals how much of humanity survived-and how much of it changed forever.

The old world is gone.
The New World has already begun.

THE NEW WORLD: VOLUME ONE is the opening novel in Jerry Staub's expansive post-apocalyptic science-fiction saga, combining survival, horror, advanced technology, mutation, mystery, and a deeply personal cross-country search through a radically transformed America.