Massif | Garth Nix

From New York Times bestseller and master of speculative fiction Garth Nix comes his first foray into adult science fiction with a brilliant and poignant stand-alone story of sentient starships, galactic warfare, and the bonds a crew forms far, far from Earth.

Caught me a mountainRode it to the stars

It’s business as usual for Ship Leader Parnell Shi-Sawahla and the crew of the corvette Sassafras. Ride a Massif to a new system, fight the enemy, repeat. For more than two hundred years humans have been hitching rides on these sentient, starfaring mountain ranges, colonizing planets and exporting an on and off again war between Earth and Mars.

But the big questions are always there, behind every battle, every new colony, every new star system discovery.

Why do the Massifs carry humans to the stars?Why do they help us export our wars?What’s in it for the Massifs?

Ship crews aren’t supposed to ask these questions, they aren’t supposed to think about these questions, and they definitely aren’t supposed to go deep and talk to Massif avatars. But now Parnell and his tight-knit crew must try to find the answers, to save not only themselves but the future of humanity.

Garth Nix OAM has been a full-time writer since 2001, but has also worked as a literary agent, marketing consultant, book editor, book publicist, book sales representative, bookseller, and as a part-time soldier in the Australian Army Reserve. Garth's books include the Old Kingdom fantasy series: Sabriel, Lirael, Abhorsen, Clariel, Goldenhand and Terciel and Elinor; SF novels Shade's Children and A Confusion of Princes; fantasy novels Angel Mage; The Left-Handed Booksellers of London and sequel The Sinister Booksellers of Bath; and a Regency romantasy, Newt's Emerald. His novels for children include The Ragwitch; the six books of The Seventh Tower sequence; Frogkisser! and the Keys to the Kingdom series; plus, co-written with Sean Williams, the Troubletwisters and Have Sword Will Travel series and Spirit Animals Book Three: Blood Ties. He is also the author of more than sixty published short stories, some of them collected in Across the Wall and To Hold the Bridge. His most recent books are Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz: Stories of the Witch Knight and the Puppet Sorcerer, which collects all nine stories of the god-slaying duo; and the children's novel We Do Not Welcome Our Ten-Year-Old Overlord. More than seven million copies of Garth's books have been sold around the world, they have appeared on the bestseller lists of The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, The Bookseller and others; and his work has been translated into 42 languages. He has won multiple Aurealis Awards, the ABIA Award, Ditmar Award, the Mythopoeic Award, CBCA Honour Book, and has been shortlisted for the Lodestar Award, the Locus Awards, the Shirley Jackson Award and others. In 2025, Garth was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) for 'services to literature'.