War Of The Maps

I've just sent the amended copy-edit of War of the Maps back to the publishers; the next stage will be combing through the proofs, and after that it will become the actual object. As the cover suggests, it's set square in prime science fiction territory: the very far future, after the Andromeda galaxy has collided with the Milky Way, and the Sun has evolved into a white dwarf. But as Adam Roberts pointed out in a recent essay, 'SF worldbuilding is part of the system of a science fiction text; but the point of SF is not its system.' Worldbuilding aside (and if you want to know a little about that, here's a link to the research paper that set me to thinking about the world of War of the Maps), what is this novel about? I'll skip the recent trend for reducing novels to bullet-point lists of fashionable tropes, and mention instead the novel's themes: the limits of heroism and how heroes are defined by the villains they pursue, and the razor-edge boundary between duty and obsession. This particular pursuit drives our hero to leave behind everything he knows and takes him into the heart of a war against a transformative alien invasion. That's all I can tell you about right now, except that the UK publication date is March 19th 2020. And if you like the sound of it, you can already preorder it here.