Book Two · Out Now
The Immortal
Gabriel Jones
The Age That Cannot Forget
He learned, across more than a century, how to keep the dead. He was not ready for the age that keeps us all.
A hundred years after the storm that fixed him at twenty-four, Gabriel Jones goes down into a hidden laboratory beneath the west Texas desert to build the impossible: a vessel that can keep a person whole against the dark. What he builds instead is a door into the future he was never meant to see.
Literary science fiction · The second Gabriel Jones novel · Paperback & Kindle
The story
Gabriel Jones has outlived everyone he ever loved, and kept them the only way a man can, by remembering. Now, beneath the west Texas desert, he sets out to build a vessel that can hold a person whole against the dark, and meets a silent boy who counts in the language of the missing. The labor that follows carries him out of his own century and into a future he helped to make: an age that records every face and forgets nothing, a mind grown from grief that has learned to think, and the oldest question there is, whether any of this is real, come round at last close enough to touch.
The Age That Cannot Forget is the second novel of The Immortal Gabriel Jones, a story about what we keep, who keeps us, and the one part of a person that no machine can ever hold.
“A person is mostly made of what is missing.”
From Chapter One
The Last Visit
He came in from the east, the way the letters had always come, along the section road that ran straight as a wire between the stubble and the sky. The wheat was off already. August did that to this country, took the gold out of it early and left the fields shorn and pale, the color of a thing that had given everything it had and was resting now. Dust stood up behind the car and hung there in the still air a long time before it settled, so that a man could look back and see exactly where he had been.
Keep reading the opening chapterAbout this book
The first novel asked what we keep, and who keeps us. This one had to ask the harder thing: whether the dead can be kept at all, and what it costs a man to try. It follows Gabriel forward out of the century that made him and into the one he outlived, an age of perfect memory, thinking machines, and questions with no floor under them. It is still, underneath, a story about grief and love and going on.
If you have read the first book, this is where Gabriel goes next. If you have not, this is a complete story on its own, and it will send you back to the beginning.
About the author
Evanson Smith is the author of The Immortal Gabriel Jones. He writes, first of all, the books he most wants to read.
Book details
- Title
- The Immortal Gabriel Jones: The Age That Cannot Forget
- Series
- The Immortal Gabriel Jones, Book Two
- Author
- Evanson Smith
- Genre
- Literary science fiction, speculative fiction
- Setting
- West Texas and beyond, 1976 into the far future
- Formats
- Paperback, $15.99, and Kindle eBook, $5.99, both at Amazon
- Published
- 2026
Set in IM Fell English and Literata, a true companion to the first novel. The scene breaks are the telegrapher's signal K, — · —, go ahead; the last page closes with SK, end of contact.
A person is mostly made of what is missing.
Buy it on AmazonBook Two · The Age That Cannot Forget · Paperback $15.99 · Kindle $5.99
© 2026 Evanson Smith · evansonsmith.com