Back to Ballhausplatz

Taking P.X to Vienna was not originally planned as a launch idea.

Quite the opposite.

Fulya and I had bought our tickets to Vienna roughly three months earlier. At that point, there was still no certainty about when the book would be finished. The trip had nothing to do with P.X; I was not planning a book launch, and I was not thinking about publishing the novel in Vienna.

There was, however, another date.

November 22.

Fulya’s birthday.

At some point, I had promised her that I would publish P.X on her birthday.

I do not remember today how realistically I had calculated the schedule when I made that promise. The novel was still developing. Edits were continuing. Finishing one section could cause another to reopen. Alongside the writing, the book’s design, print files, and publishing preparations had also entered the process.

But the date was there.

November 22, 2025.

And I kept moving toward it as best I could.

As time passed, something strange happened.

The book really did begin to look as though it would make it.

Draft 3.1 was completed. Publishing files were prepared. Checks were carried out. A date that had once existed only as, “It would be nice if I could finish it in time for Fulya’s birthday,” started to become genuinely possible.

Then we realized that two separate stories on the calendar were moving toward the same point.

We would be in Vienna on November 22.

And P.X could be published on November 22.

The coincidence was already lovely on its own. But for P.X, Vienna was not just another city.

The novel begins there in 1815, during the Congress of Vienna.

For me, the first door into a story that would eventually stretch hundreds of years forward into space, other civilizations, and humanity’s place in the galaxy opened exactly there: in Ballhausplatz.

When the Legacy Edition of P.X: No Man’s Space was published on November 22, 2025, we were in Vienna.

On Fulya’s birthday.

I had kept my promise.

But our first thought when the book went live was not, “Let’s stage a launch in Vienna.” We thought of something simpler and, to me, much more meaningful.

Let’s take the book to the place where the story begins.

We had a printed copy of P.X with us.

We took it to Ballhausplatz.

It was not an official event. There were no readers, journalists, or publishing staff around us. No table had been set up. There were no books waiting to be signed. No one was expecting us.

There was Fulya, me, and P.X.

And in front of me was the place where the first pages of the world I had spent two years building were set.

It is difficult to describe in one word what I felt when I looked at the book in my hands and then at Ballhausplatz.

For a brief moment, fiction and the real world seemed to touch.

Not years earlier, but only a few months before, I had been sitting at my computer writing Vienna in 1815. I had placed characters in those streets and within the political atmosphere of that period. Among people trying to reshape the future of Europe, I had planted the first traces of the much larger story of P.X.

Now that story was no longer inside a file.

It was in my hands.

And I had brought it back to where it began.

Holding one of the first editions of P.X in Ballhausplatz, I felt for the first time that the two-year journey had closed a circle on itself.

The story had begun there in 1815.

The novel had traveled hundreds of years into the future.

And after writing it, I had brought it back to its starting point.

That became one of the reasons the Legacy Edition took on a meaning of its own for me.

Later I would return to the manuscript and work through Drafts 3.2, 3.3, and eventually 3.4. The Second Edition would be published months later. The editorial journey of P.X was not yet finished.

But November 22, 2025, was something else.

That day represented far more than a version number.

A promise I had made to Fulya had been kept.

The novel I had worked on for two years had entered the world for the first time.

And one of its first journeys had been back to the place where its own story began.

Standing in Ballhausplatz with the book in my hands, I had no idea where P.X would go next.

I did not know how many people would read it.

I did not know whether it would one day end up in the hands of people in other countries.

I did not even know that months later I would sit down and write the story of this journey.

But in that moment, I did not need the answers to any of those questions.

The book was there.

Fulya was beside me.

And P.X had returned to where it began.