Like my other books, Alien Son is science fiction, with more than a hint of romance.
It’s set in the same world as Saving Aran, and those of you who have read that book will recognize some of the characters. You may remember that there was a mystery in Saving Aran that was not resolved in that book: How can it be that there are humans on both Earth and Aran? These are people so genetically similar that they can interbreed. The odds they would evolve independently on two planets light-years apart are miniscule, like the odds that simple Brownian motion would suddenly lift your entire desk up into the air. Yet, though scientists have searched both planets for any archaeological or other evidence of any kind of alien contact in the past, there is nothing that can explain the existence of these two entirely separate human populations.
There’s also an unresolved personal mystery in Saving Aran. Cort’s father is no longer around. His mother tells him his father “went to Earth.” Does she mean that literally, that he somehow managed to get aboard one of the Earthers’ starships and literally fly to planet Earth? In the slang of the city where Cort grew up, the phrase “went to Earth” is a euphemism for dying. It seems more likely his father died than somehow managed to get to Earth. In the khenaran–the ancient forest–those who die are reborn, but the wise whynywir, who know everything about the planet, have no information about Cort’s father. Is it possible he really did fly to Earth?
Alien Son answers both of these questions. And way more, besides. Best of all, there’s no need to read Saving Aran first. Instead, you can read Alien Son first as a completely stand-alone book, and then later, if you wish, enjoy Cort’s back story.
In Alien Son, we meet Mikel, half Earther and half Arantu, the much-younger son of Cort’s father. The son born on Earth with an Earther mother. The son who is driven to pursue some great accomplishment in his life that will be worthy of his martyr father’s heroic efforts to save Aran from Earther exploitation.
We also meet Aiana, a historian from the far-distant future, who is using time travel based on technology-enhanced lucid dreaming to seek out a historically significant personage from Earth’s past (as she sees it). She finds Mikel on Aran. He’s the one she is looking for, but he has no intention of returning to Earth. Yet he must, for history has already been written. How can she get him to fulfill his destiny, even if it means his death? Worse, her dreaming self is getting harder to control. She’s falling in love with the man.
Time travel, it turns out, is incredibly hard to write. My future could be your past, and both of these might be different from an objectively drawn timeline. There is a very large time loop in Alien Son, spanning millennia of objective time. At any point in the story, the two protagonists know very different things because they’ve been in different objective times at different subjective times.
Finally, I had to draw a flowchart to keep it all straight, and to make sure the time-twisted story is actually self-consistent. I’ve shown this flowchart to a few people, but never publicly, not until now. You are seeing it first, here.
Spoiler alert! If you prefer to enjoy your surprises in the twists and turns of the book, scroll down no further! You can buy the book (or read for free on Kindle Unlimited) here.
