Today is the publication day for our latest Eagle Books title, Victor Kelleher’s marvellous new science fiction adventure novel, The Lastling!

It’s the third Victor Kelleher title which we’ve had the pleasure and privilege of publishing, and like its predecessors, Wanderer (2023) and The Cave (2024) it’s absolutely brilliant–exciting, moving and thought-provoking, and we are thrilled to be publishing it. It’s a gorgeous production too, with striking cover and internal illustrations by Lorena Carrington, and elegant design by Authors’ Elves.

With its Android and human protagonists, The Lastling is both an extraordinary adventure set in a disturbing future, and also a timely and thought-provoking exploration of what it really means to be human.

Here’s Victor on what inspired the novel: Artificial intelligence, robotics, and the whole notion of the android have been much in the news recently, and rightly so, in light of current technology. Yet underlying this interest is a much longer-standing issue: will AI be friendly to us, or will it threaten our human world? Many novels and films have offered an answer to this question. Some, like the film Terminator, give us two possible answers – AI as both friend and mortal enemy.  So what does The Lastling add to this debate? At one level, like Terminator, it gives two answers, in the forbidding person of Brother John and the gentle figure of Guido. However, it also poses deeper questions. How does an android as gentle as Guido survive in the face of both AI and human aggression? How does he interact with someone as deeply human as Verne? And how does he out-think his own programming? Is such independence on his part even possible? And if so, is he, in some profound sense, also human? Now there’s a scary thought! And it’s that scary thought, more than any other, that inspired me to write this novel.

Congratulations to Victor on a wonderful novel which we are sure is just going to fly into the hands of eager readers!