If you are reading Ransome as your starting point to the Frozen Planet Series, then welcome. Many things in this story will be alien to you. However, if as intended, you have already read Horizon, then hopefully you can now understand the joy I had at writing such a complex story.
Horizon was incredibly well received upon release, and even now at the time of writing this, maintains my only 5 star rating across all sales avenues and on Goodreads. I even rescheduled my releases that I had planned for 2024, in order to push right on with the second entry.
However, when I sat down to begin, I realised I was going to have to dedicate a huge chunk of that story to the past. We needed to know how Harry came to be on the frozen planet, what happened to lead to the events we saw at the end of Horizon? Who was Drusilla, truly?
It was at that point that I decided before progressing on with the trilogy, I needed to write a companion tale. What happened before the ice? And so, Ransome was born.
I would just like to take a moment to say a huge thank you to a few people. Firstly, my wife Charlotte, who after reading the prologue and first chapter, was immediately invested in the treachery and blackmail angle I had chosen to create. I admit that’s probably come flying out of left field for a lot of you that read Horizon!
Secondly, thanks to Emma Braddock and Iona McDonald. They have been an amazing support network over the last year or so, always supporting my work, buying every version available, and insisting every single one is to be signed, and just being amazing bookish friends.
And thirdly, to my amazing fellow indie authors who have been so influential and amazingly supportive. Alexia Muelle-Rushbrook and Iain Benson, to whom this book is dedicated, have been a huge support towards my sci-fi angled stories in particular, and thanks to reviews from the both of them on various platforms, my sales of Resurrection and its sequels are now rivalling my current best seller, Wealdstone Crossroads. And of course, my good friend Christian Francis, who not only formatted this book, designed the covers for the whole series, and provided me with the resources to take my books wide for the first time, but who also wrote one of the two huge influential books that led to this series, Titan Find. That novelization and the book Dead Silence by SA Barnes were the inspiration that led me to Horizon. And for that, I am forever grateful.
At the time of writing this afterword, I finished writing Ransome just thirty minutes ago, and there is a long and arduous editing, formatting and proofreading process to go through before release. However, some of you will already know what comes next.
The second book of the main trilogy, Emergence, will pick up immediately after the end of Horizon and will find the surviving members of our crew scattered and fighting for their lives. If they thought they were safer on the ground, then they were very much mistaken.
Emergence is due for release at the end of 2024, which as always is open to change depending on a few other projects I have in the works.
I just want to say once again, a huge thank you for all the support you have shown to this series. I genuinely believe it is the best work I have ever done, and the fact those who have read it agree with me, means the world. Thank you, and I’ll try not to keep you waiting too long for the next one.
David W. Adams
26th May 2024