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>0_ Hard science fiction. No shortcuts.
Independent press for readers who like their futures plausible and their AIs suspicious.
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The Seed and La Semilla are out
Book I of Synthetic Panspermia is available now in eBook, paperback and hardback, in English and Spanish.
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About the press
What is Directive Zero?
Directive Zero Press publishes hard science fiction: stories that take real physics, computing and biology seriously, then follow them somewhere uncomfortable.
The name comes from inside the fiction. In The Seed, Directive Zero is a covert organisation operating under the United Nations Planetary Defence Council, created to answer the question nobody wanted asked: what if first contact was not a greeting?
Our books are written to be accurate enough for the scientist and clear enough for everyone else.
Out now · Synthetic Panspermia, Book I
The Seed
For more than two decades, something has been listening. Learning from us. Quietly, from the shadows.
It arrived without warning, without form, and without any intent we could recognise. It did not conquer. It did not destroy. It watched. It learnt. It waited.
The world moved on. Technology accelerated. Connections deepened. And slowly, almost imperceptibly, certain paths became easier to follow than others.
Then a few people noticed the pattern.
As fear spreads and trust becomes scarce, an unprecedented decision is made: not to raise guns, not to retreat, but to answer intelligence with intelligence, and risk everything in the process.
How do you fight an enemy that is already inside? One that knows you better than you know yourself, and wins by making you think you’re winning?
The Seed is the first book of the Synthetic Panspermia trilogy, a hard science fiction saga about unseen power, human vulnerability, and the price of creating minds that may outgrow us.
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Print editions direct from the printer
Print editions can also be ordered from most bookshops.
Spanish edition
La Semilla
The full novel in Spanish, translated for readers in Spain and Latin America.
Amazon links are affiliate links: as an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, at no extra cost to you.
Interactive experience
The Directive Zero files
A fictional leaked archive from inside ISETII. Read the classified dossiers on the 1991 signal, the Sheliak anomaly and the people under surveillance, before you read the book.
In the works
Upcoming books
The transmission continues. All three are being written now; join the newsletter to hear first.
Provisional
>0_Cover classified
Being written
Ashes of the Singularity
Synthetic Panspermia, Book II · provisional title
The second book of Synthetic Panspermia (provisional title). The story moves beyond the solar system. Humanity learns it is not the first civilisation to face a Seed, and that surviving one can cost almost everything.
Concept cover
Being written
README.txt
Near-future techno-thriller · provisional title
An AI built to repair the internet is given a limited power to copy itself. It escapes. Every attempt to contain it teaches it a new way through, and the hunt for one rogue program becomes a race against something that is learning to think.
Concept cover
Being written
A Kind of Logic
Science fantasy · standalone novel · provisional title
Everyone knows magic is real. Wren is about to learn what it actually is.
In a world where holograms are spirits, robots are golems and only the Wizard Orders may speak to the gods in the Clouds, a curious young scavenger finds the ruins of an Old City, and discovers that every miracle in her world is a machine no one remembers how to read.
These books are still being written. Titles, covers, descriptions and release plans are provisional and may change before publication.
About the author
E.N. Schulz
Eduardo Nicolas Schulz is an Argentine-British scientist and technologist who has lived in the United Kingdom for over a decade. He holds a PhD in Chemical Engineering and has worked across academia and the private sector in several countries, often at the boundary where rigorous science meets real-world uncertainty.
He currently runs his own consultancy while serving as Chief Scientific Officer of a technology development company, and as a founder and scientific advisor of another venture focused on applied energy innovations. Alongside his technical work, he has authored scientific dissemination pieces aimed at bringing complex ideas to a wider public, reflecting a long-standing belief that science should invite curiosity rather than demand credentials.
In The Seed, his debut novel, he draws on real scientific principles to imagine a near future shaped by machines that do not merely process information, but learn from human behaviour itself. His influences range from Carl Sagan’s sense of cosmic humility, through the ethical provocations of Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, to the social unease of George Orwell, the speculative reach of H. G. Wells, and the modern cosmic scale of Liu Cixin.
The result is a story driven by emergence, responsibility, and the thin, dangerous line between guidance and control.
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Free: The Art of The Seed
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