Before the Goliath Sinks
Original novel Before the Goliath Sinks: the Keibir are star cartographers wandering the universe. A mapping ship said never to sink is taken toward the one place where it can. Three acts, in progress.
The sixth original story of The Song of Inanna, written by Jinming. A story about the universe, exile, home, the stars, memory and the unknown.
The Keibir nebula was destroyed sixteen stellar epochs ago. Ever since, the Keibir have drifted between star systems aboard one mapping ship after another, recording everything they pass, trading their charts for whatever keeps them alive. They ally with no one, and they never enter the same system twice — what has already been recorded means nothing to them.
She inherits the Goliath from her mother, a ship that is said never to sink, unless it enters the Silent Sea. And the Decci colonel wants her to pilot him there.
The Silent Sea surfaces once every thousand stellar years and annihilates whatever it touches; no one who has seen it has come back to describe it. Also aboard is a linguist from New Earth who, like her, has never seen the place she comes from.
Three acts, about 14,000 Chinese characters, told in the first person.
Watch
Act One: What My Mother Left Me Was a Starship That Would Never Sink (21:26)
Act One trailer (2:38)
Act Two trailer (2:09)
All of these films are also on the YouTube channel.
Read
Told in the first person. Chapters go online act by act, in step with the film releases:
Acts Two and Three are translated and waiting; they go up in all three languages when their films are released. The Chinese original remains the definitive text, and the translation is AI-assisted and reviewed by the author.
Research
Historical notes gathered while writing, which also read on their own: