Fe: an Atom's Tale

Born from a dying red giant, the atom Fe orbits the early Solar system, trapped aboard an iron-nickel asteroid. Now, after billions of years of waiting, Fe is about to fall to Earth and into the clutches of vicious and clever Homo sapiens.

Cloud Atlas meets Forrest Gump meets Albert Einstein in this fast-paced, grippingly brilliant 8-billion-year biography of the universe’s most interesting iron atom.

Benjamin Bronte’s brilliant debut novel FE: AN ATOM’S TALE (Elegua Editions, May 28, 2024) is an ingenious telling of humanity’s past, present, and future, all through the quantum-scale perspective of a single atom. Near-indestructible and ineffably magnetic, Fe is a hero like no other. After its flaming, plummeting asteroid slams into the sands of ancient Mesopotamia, Fe finds itself forged into a deadly weapon by powerful princes whose peoples have not yet discovered the secret of iron smelting.

Time, gravity, and fundamental forces march ever onwards, leaving unforgettable characters and their deeply-human narratives behind, following the immortal and infinitesimal Fe to its next grand adventure. Thrilling scenes of the Second World War give way to the humorous, and often maddening, complexity of our own overconnected 21st-century world–only for Fe to leave Earth forever, welded into a spaceship, destined to settle other worlds…

In FE: AN ATOM’S TALE, the science on every page is meticulously accurate, while its immersive, metaphor-rich writing style ensures that readers remain entertained rather than overwhelmed. Benjamin Bronte’s training as a physicist and educator, paired with relentless research, has produced an unprecedented level of plausibility for a work of science fiction.

Readers of FE: AN ATOM’S TALE will learn how magnetic fields work during a shoot-out in a drug lab, and they’ll come to appreciate the role of hemoglobin while enjoying a tribal feast. Following Fe, readers will learn about metallurgy, cosmology, how to break into the Louvre, dive-bombers, fair prices for classic guitars, photosynthesis, and how to accidentally start a religion. Fe may be a single, mindless atom of iron, but what other novel’s main character rides on a meteor, is captured by Nazis, and lives inside a goat?

Fe’s may be the smallest story ever told, but no other novel has gone so deep and in such an entertaining manner. Garnering instant praise from fans in early releases, FE: AN ATOM’S TALE is proving to be a remarkably unique, and remarkably entertaining, debut. Written in the spirit of Isaac Asimov and hard science fiction like Steven Baxter and Arthur C. Clarke, FE: AN ATOM’S TALE presents something entirely new: a groundbreaking novel that puts the ‘science’ back in science fiction.