A Novel by Paul Carter

Toward
Oblivion Paul Carter

What happens when we finally achieve paradise — and lose the very struggle that made us human?

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The Story

Synopsis

When the Chinese destroy Washington D.C. with a weapon fired from the Moon, aerospace engineer Henry James faces an impossible choice: weaponize his revolutionary interplanetary spacecraft — or watch humanity's future slip into the abyss. The Xevion was never meant for war. Henry designed it to open the solar system to human exploration, to fulfill the promise that visionaries like Clarke and Asimov once dreamed possible.

But with America's capital in ruins and the world teetering on the brink of annihilation, peaceful intentions become a luxury no one can afford. As Henry races to neutralize the lunar threat, test pilots Jack Wells and Bill Polk seize an unauthorized opportunity that will make them the first humans to set foot on Mars — and change the course of human civilization forever.

Their achievement plants the seeds of something far more dangerous than any weapon: a utopian vision that promises paradise at a terrible cost. Eighty years later, on a transformed and peaceful Mars, Henry's great-grandson will discover the truth. The greatest danger facing humanity was never extinction from external forces, but extinction from internal complacency — a slow, seductive slide toward oblivion.

The greatest danger facing humanity was never extinction from external forces — but extinction from internal complacency.

— Toward Oblivion, Paul Carter

Central Themes

Three Questions
Across One Century

01
⚛

Weaponized Idealism

When the instruments of exploration become instruments of war, the engineer's conscience becomes the last battlefield. Henry James built the Xevion to open the cosmos — not to close a civilization. The tension between invention and destruction runs like a fault line through every chapter.

02
♃

The Paradox of Paradise

A utopia achieved is a struggle surrendered. On the terraformed plains of Mars, eighty years of peace have produced something the architects of civilization never anticipated — a species no longer capable of the very hardships that forged it. Progress becomes its own most insidious predator.

03
◈

The Republic's Spine

The Constitution is not merely law — it is the distilled wisdom of hard-won liberty. As the old world burns and a new one rises across the void, the question is not whether humanity will survive, but whether it will remember what it was that made survival worth the cost.

Principal Characters

The Architects of Two Worlds

Aerospace Engineer

Henry James

Designer of the Xevion. A man who built a ship to carry humanity's hopes and found himself ordered to turn it into a weapon. His choices ripple across generations.

Test Pilot

Jack Wells

The first human to stand on Martian soil. A pilot of extraordinary nerve who seized an unauthorized window of history and stepped through it without looking back.

Test Pilot

Bill Polk

Wells' co-conspirator in the greatest unauthorized act of exploration in human history. Where Wells was nerve, Polk was calculation — the steady hand on a trembling mission.

Henry's Great-Grandson

The Inheritor

Born eighty years into the Martian peace, he must confront the inheritance of paradise — and the terrible truth his great-grandfather left buried beneath the red dust.

Literary Lineage

Written in the Tradition of the Masters

✦

In the tradition of Arthur C. Clarke's philosophical depth, Isaac Asimov's social commentary, and Frank Herbert's exploration of human nature — Toward Oblivion asks the question none of them dared fully answer.

Arthur C. Clarke

Philosophical Depth

Isaac Asimov

Social Commentary

Frank Herbert

Human Nature

Narrative Arc

A Century of
Consequence

Near Future — Year Zero

Washington D.C. Falls

A weapon deployed from lunar orbit reduces America's capital to ash. The republic reels. Henry James stares at the wreckage of his peaceful ambitions and the weight of an empire's expectation.

Year Zero + Months

The Xevion Flies

Henry makes his choice. The Xevion, humanity's first true interplanetary vessel, launches on a mission it was never designed to complete — toward the Moon and the weapon waiting there.

Year Zero + Unauthorized Hours

First Footsteps on Mars

Wells and Polk, in defiance of every directive, divert to Mars. Two pilots. Two suits. The red dust of another world beneath boots that history will never forget. The future is planted here, in the soil of unauthorized audacity.

Year Zero + 80 Years

The Martian Paradise

Mars has been transformed. Cities dome the rust-colored plains. A generation has never known war, never known want, never known the sharp edge of necessity. They are, by every measure, the most comfortable humans who have ever lived. And in this comfort, something vital has gone quiet.

The Present of the Novel's End

The Discovery

Henry's great-grandson unearths the truth his ancestor buried. The enemy was never the Chinese weapon on the Moon. It was always the slow, painless erasure of the very hunger that drives a civilization forward — toward the stars, toward meaning, toward something worth the cost of being alive.

Paul Carter, Author

Paul Carter

Author • Novelist • American

Paul Carter writes science fiction in the grand tradition — work that uses the future as a lens through which to examine the present, and the cosmos as a stage upon which to stage the oldest of human dramas: the conflict between what we are and what we might become.

A patriot in the truest sense — one who believes the republic is not a gift but an ongoing argument, not a destination but a discipline — Carter writes characters who grapple with the weight of constitutional ideals in unconstitutional circumstances. His fiction asks not whether America will survive, but whether what survives will still be worth calling America.

Toward Oblivion is a culmination of those obsessions: a novel of spacecraft and political ruin, of first footsteps and last warnings, of the universe opened and the soul quietly closing.

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Toward Oblivion is available now. A century of humanity's greatest triumph and most insidious failure — bound in one volume.

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ISBN — 978-1-105-68699-3  |  Paul Carter  |  Toward Oblivion