The Outside (2019)

Yasira Shien's scientific work brings her into conflict with AI gods and their altered, post-human agents. The promise of power over a body sits beside coercion, loyalty and the question of what a person must surrender to serve. Hoffmann keeps an autistic scientist's perspective within a universe that is frighteningly larger than its rulers admit. A demanding blend of space opera and cosmic horror, with body alteration as one strand of a wider struggle over agency. The trilogy begins here.