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Front cover of The Cradle Estranged by Ian Winfield Dansereau — Book One of The Longcrossing, published by Odisena.
Odisena · Novel

The Cradle Estranged

Book One of The Longcrossing (33 volumes planned)

By Ian Winfield Dansereau

Odisena Imprint · Library of Alexandria · First Edition · 2026

In 2026, fourteen thousand people volunteered for a one-way ticket to Mars. Cal Thane was the one who didn't tell his mother.

A structural engineer raised on his mother's hardest lesson — things fail from the inside, quietly — Cal has spent twenty-nine years being useful, reliable, and impossible to truly know. The Longcrossing Initiative's first permanent settlement mission demands something else entirely: a crew that can survive each other. Through brutal selection trials, a 120-day Antarctic isolation test, the slow goodbye of everyone he loves, and the six-month crossing itself, Cal learns that endurance is not the same as strength — and that the only way to carry a one-way journey is to let someone see the crack before the wall comes down.

Then, in a collapsed lava tube beneath Kestrel Basin, the settlers find something that has been waiting far longer than humanity has existed. And it wakes when Cal's shadow falls across it.

Book One of THE LONGCROSSING — a thirty-three-book voyage from the red dust of Mars to the far shore of the galaxy.

Retail Edition Pending

Manuscript status: complete and typeset. Retail listings on Amazon KDP are pending operator upload; no live purchase link is asserted until the listing goes live.

What the book contains

From the red dust of Mars to the far shore of the galaxy

  • Cal Thane's selection, training, and the 120-day Antarctic isolation trial
  • The six-month crossing itself, and the slow goodbye of everyone he loves
  • The first permanent settlement mission of the Longcrossing Initiative
  • A discovery in a collapsed lava tube beneath Kestrel Basin
  • Book One of a thirty-three-volume series
Series

The Longcrossing — Book One: The Cradle Estranged. Book Two: Selection Pressure (forthcoming). Thirty-three volumes planned.

Cal Thane's story continues in SELECTION PRESSURE.

Edition information

Editions & identifiers

Ebook ISBN
979-8-951779-38-0
Paperback ISBN
979-8-951779-39-7
Hardcover ISBN
979-8-951779-40-3
Trim size
6 × 9 in
Page count
201 pages
Publisher
Odisena
Language
English
Publication year
2026

Edition state: the manuscript is complete and typeset for all three editions (ebook, paperback, hardcover). Retail Edition Pending — retail listings on Amazon KDP await operator upload; no live purchase link is asserted until the listing goes live.

ISBNs are assigned from the Odisena registration block per approved governance (979-8-951779-38-0 for the ebook edition; 979-8-951779-39-7 for the paperback edition; 979-8-951779-40-3 for the hardcover edition). The authoritative ISBN registry is maintained outside this repository; the binding registry claim is a separate database action and is not asserted as executed by this page.