Living spaceships, plague planets, and a quote from Josef Mengele: ‘The Sixth Nik’ is NYT bestselling author Daniel Kraus’ 1st sci-fi novel, and it’s really weird (Image Credit: Space.com)
New York Times bestselling author Daniel Kraus, whose popular “Whalefall” novel was adapted into an upcoming feature film by Ron Howard’s Imagine Entertainment, sets his creative compass for an interstellar odyssey to a mysterious planet in his first entry into science fiction books with “The Sixth Nik“. We chatted to Kraus about the upcoming novel, and he even gave us an exclusive excerpt to share before its June 26, 2026, arrival.
Kraus co-wrote the “Trollhunters” book with director Guillermo del Toro, which was transformed into the hit Netflix animated series, as well as the novelization of del Toro’s Academy Award-winning sci-fi horror romance film, “The Shape of Water.” “The Sixth Nik” promises to be an extraordinary journey into the darker depths of the genre when it appears later this summer.
Per Kraus, “The Sixth Nik” blossomed in his brain via a bizarre manner, as a robotic take on the 1962 thriller “What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?”
“The finished novel bears no resemblance to that idea — except maybe a single chapter near the book’s middle — and that’s ultimately what made the project so exciting for me,” he tells Space.com.
“It grew almost fungally around that notion in both directions, larger and larger, until it was a monster I could barely control. I usually work with outlines, but “The Sixth’s outline was hilariously short, especially given the complexity of the story.”
Kraus admits to writing in a variety of genres, and his influences almost never come from those arenas. For “The Sixth Nik,” inspirations included artworks such as Ariel Dorfman’s “Death and the Maiden,” John Ford’s “The Searchers,” and the previously mentioned “What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?”
“Not to put too fine a point on it, but what spurred the story’s growth more than anything else was the lead-up to the 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and the increasing attacks on the lives of trans people,” he adds.
“There’s no other sensible way to look at these movements except to say the American government is trying to control the physical bodies of flesh-and-blood people. It’s an extremely short path between these efforts and herding humans into concentration camps. Believe me, I don’t begin a novel with a quote from Josef Mengele lightly.”
Check out this exclusive excerpt from Daniel Kraus’ “The Sixth Nik”:
They called it The Sickness.
It was docked at Anchor 102. To the starboard side, at Anchor 101,
was the black titanium semicircle of a four-deck UN+ army gunship,
studded with pulse cannons and plated in armadillo-like armor. To the
port side, at Anchor 103, was a yellow D-class yacht, symmetrical down
to the six grav rafts nestled along either side.
Between these exemplars of balletic grace, The Sickness looked like
a chunk of an Oort Behemoth that had fallen off, caught onto the side
of Tepper Base, and rotted. If The Dermis resembled human skin, The
Spine a backbone, and The Pelvis intestines, The Sickness, too, was unmistakable,
a veined, globular mass of metastatic tissue.
It looked like a tumor.
I stared through the Anchor 102 window and practiced breathing
techniques while beset by waves of fear and disgust. In total mass, The
Sickness scarcely exceeded one of Earth’s wide-body airliners, if that airliner
was chewed into a bolus, dipped in blood, and left to fester in an
equatorial heat. Its very presence seemed to affect the adjacent gunship
and yacht. The shining hulls of each ship grayed as if fighting a losing
battle against a virulent contagion.
I could but guess at how the exterior features of a typical spacecraft
had been translated to this bioprinted abomination. A cauliflower of
purple boils might house the cockpit. The flabby sack of veined flesh
swaying testicularly from the bottom of the ship could be the cargo
hold. Where I expected an air lock was a set of lippy fibromas, plump
and glossy, with retractable ramps like cancerous tongues. At the top of
the ship wobbled a giant bubble of translucent pink flesh, lidded and
extruded like an eyeball sarcoma, probably to facilitate sunlight toward
a hydroponic garden. A pox of grapelike bulges off the ship’s side looked
swollen with pus, but for all I knew held living quarters. Barely in view
was a hemorrhoidal sphincter that, with every relaxation, revealed an
eggy lump like a prostate tumor—the ship’s aerotonal room, I suspected.
The trigov assembly behind me cheered. But distaste was evident in
their pained grins, and their eyes betrayed fresh apprehension of me.
Plasmagraphs did not make mistakes. The Sickness was everything its
crew needed it to be. The question became, What kind of crew could
have inspired a ship like this? What kind of Niffakoq?
I was to have no escort inside The Sickness, no official tour. The point
of a plasmagraphic ship, after all, was that it required no introduction—
in a very real sense, I had helped design it. I took a deep, even breath.
My full-body jumper, the simplest, most monkish wear I could find on
Tepper, whispered along my body, reassuring me I had trained nine
years for this Chore—a Chore I had been briefed upon for hours the
day before, and which frankly enthralled me.
I entered the boarding bridge alone. Applause vibrated the girders.
But it died out while I could still hear it and was rapidly replaced by the
footfalls of people, even those I had nikked as modded for self-control,
who could not wait to get the plasmagraphed ship out of their sight.
