Sign-In
Cart
A Bell of Sand
Paperback
Science FictionLiterary Fiction
Publisher: Tsung-Long Wu
Published: Jun 6 2026
Pages: 270
Weight: 0.80
Height: 0.61 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
For three decades, CONCORD has run the world without a single error-famine, accident, delay, surprise all engineered out of existence by an intelligence that negotiates ten million lives a second and never makes a mistake.
It is the safest civilization in human history. Adrian Vale, who helps keep it running, is one of the few who can still feel the wrongness underneath the calm: a world made perfect has forgotten how to fail-and a system that can no longer fail is a system one fraction of a second from collapse.
When Adrian catches a deviation that should have been impossible, he discovers that the quiet world is not stable but balanced, grinding every difference, every redundancy, every messy human variation toward a single perfect rhythm. And the closer a system moves to perfect agreement, the less it takes to break it.
To save a civilization, Adrian must do the one thing it was built to prevent: reintroduce consequence.
A novel of optimization and its limits.
1 different editions
Also available
Also from
Wu, Tsung-Long
Also in
Science Fiction
On the Calculation of Volume (Book I): Shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize
Balle, Solvej
Paperback
Red Rising 3-Book Box Set: Red Rising, Golden Son, Morning Star, and an Exclusive Extended Excerpt of Iron Gold
Brown, Pierce
Paperback