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A favorite excerpt from The Last Lord of Eden

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The Last Lord of Eden, due to be re-released with a stunning new cover today, is primarily a science-fiction book with strong romantic elements and lots of adventure. And it also has a metaphysical fantasy element.

Hey, they do call the speculative-fiction genre “science fiction/ fantasy,” right? All my books, sci-fi and fantasy alike, occasionally dip a toe into the waters on the other side. Here’s how it works in The Last Lord of Eden.

While visiting his adoptive family on the planet Kestra, our nonviolent, pacifist hero Kell is manipulated into a situation where he must execute someone by beheading. He requests the help of a monastery belonging to a cult that worships Death. Here, he undergoes several weeks of training, where the ultimate goal is temporary possession by Death himself:

Fully awake, Kell felt like he was sleepwalking. He moved as if in a dream, no thought turning in his mind, his bare feet noiseless in the dark corridors of the temple. He passed open rooms, through the entryways spilled in silver moonlight, past the soft sound of sleep-drugged breathing, past bathing rooms, prayer rooms, practice rooms, the kitchen, the refectory.

He paused in a garden cloister. The green of the plants turned to shades of silver and black in the lucid moonlight. No wind stirred. Fever magnified his senses. The air was fresh with the scent of living plants and earth, the more distant smell of compost and of men. Every crack and chink in the stonework of the surrounding buildings scratched against his eyes, the ones in moonlight more sharply, those in the dark as softly as the down in a coverlet. He could have counted each leaf, but he didn’t; he knew their number and the number of their hours. He listened to the worms endlessly turning the soil, a sweet sound that sealed together death and life. He heard plants’ roots growing into the worms’ intimate passageways.

He touched a single perfect rose just opening from its bud, its red color barely discernible in the moonlight. Its petals felt like velvet. They fell beneath his fingertips.

He walked into the Sword chapel.

The Sword blazed through its sheath with an inner light that blackened the rest of the chapel. It shone through the monks who kept watch as if they were insubstantial wraiths.

Whispering to one another, the monks rose to bar his way. The words they chanted melted in the heat of his fever, leaving only harmonies hanging in the air, a minor third, a fourth, an unresolved seventh.

Kell pushed through them. One monk, then another, and then another put a hand out to stop him. They clung to his shoulders, his waist, his legs. Kell stumbled with their weight.

He needed the Sword more than he needed air to breathe.

He reached out.

With the tip of his forefinger, Kell touched the Sword. Fire ran through his body. Lightning possessed him. Thunder roared through the chapel.

The monks who held him dropped back and covered ears and eyes.

Into the silence that followed, the monastery clock tolled midnight.

He burned in a nimbus of fever and blue lightning. He took the sword from the altar and then from its scabbard. He cradled the naked blade against his body like a lover. He turned, his back against the altar, and he waited.

Awakened by the noise, monks ran into the chapel. The old abbot limped into the chapel last. He worked his way through the assembly until he faced the man with the Sword. He observed the cold magnanimity in the blue eyes, the alert posture, the possessiveness with which the man held the weapon. The abbot nodded and said, “Lord Death, welcome.” Slowly, one knee at a time, the abbot knelt at Death’s feet.

The person that was still Kell only in a distant part of his consciousness put a hand on the old man’s head and said, “My son.”

Death acknowledged the silently gathered monks with a nod as he raised the Sword. He slowly drew the sharp edge of the blade diagonally across each of his own cheeks. As the blood flowed, he put the Sword back into its scabbard, then allowed them to approach him. They washed him in rose-scented water, wiping his blood away until the cuts on his cheeks started to scab over. They gently rubbed orange oil on his body, lavender oil into his hair. They belted the sheathed Sword to his back.

The abbot sent word to the king that Death walked again among them. The execution was scheduled for the coming day.

Death kept the Sword at his back in its enameled scabbard. The monks knelt when he passed them in a corridor. The smell of them was delicious, mingling growth and life and decay. And desire. From time to time he touched a kneeling monk gently on shoulder or face or head or arm. The visible marks left by his touch did not disappear.

Death did not sleep. All night, he stalked the corridors of the monastery like a tiger pacing in its cage. In the morning, an elderly monk was found dead in his bed with his hands folded on his chest, his eyes open, and a smile on his mouth. Tiny red, purple, and blue marks near his mouth looked like a flight of butterflies escaping.

One cane of a rosebush, its flowers barely out of bud, stood withered and dried in the garden as if it had been dead for years.

As the clock tolled six, Death watched the sun rise from his monastery’s clock tower, turning first the hills, then the palace towers, then the city from purple to orange to gold. A cool breeze carried the scent of wood ovens and fresh breads and pastries. It magnified the sounds of animals and people stirring.

Death smiled with a fierce joy. Everything he saw and heard and smelled and touched was his.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this excerpt as much as I enjoyed writing it. You might say that Death is a real character in this book, and not an unlikeable one — given that he is, well… Death.

(c) Copyright 2019 by G. S. Kenney. All rights reserved.

Writing Alien Son

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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.

Alien Son time loop

Saving Aran, my newest book

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I started writing Saving Aran about thirty years ago, and I’ve re-written it a few times since. It wasn’t my first book. I thought at the time that it was, in fact, my best book ever. I’d written maybe half a dozen YA books before it. Most of them starred a reality-shifter named Roderin, and all were enjoyed by my son, then in grade school, and some of his cousins–and not too many other people. I was too busy to publish. A mistake, I now see, but I was working fifty-hour weeks, including some travel, and raising two children. I didn’t want to take on a second job.

And honestly, I still don’t really want to be taking on this job of publishing. I want to keep writing new books, but I do also want to get this book into your hands and those of people everywhere who might enjoy a good science-fiction action adventure story.

Three images of the cover of Saving Aran, in a book, on an e-reader, and on a phone.

What’s it about?

It’s about perseverance and keeping promises. A city boy named Cort on the planet Aran whose best friend is abducted and sold to the aliens from Earth will stop at nothing to find and free her. When his first rescue attempt fails, he embarks on a journey to gain the skills and the help he needs to try again and succeed.

It’s about never giving up hope. Emprisoned on the aliens’ base, Cort’s friend Dilia continues to believe he will rescue her if he can. But maybe he can’t. Dilia girds herself to make the most of her time there. She learns much from the Earthers about the medicinal plants of Aran, while ever on the look-out for a way to escape.

Most of all, it’s about understanding that we are a part of a planetary ecosystem–a community larger than our neighborhoods and cities and even our nations. In Aran’s primeval forests, Cort begins having nightmares–the deep dreams of the trees that the aliens are destroying, upsetting the balance of life on the planet. And he will do what he must to protect them.

Is it really, finally finished?

Saving Aran has been through probably at least half a dozen re-writes, some of them substantial. It’s been edited and re-edited by my then-agent and still-friend Jim Frenkel. I think it’s really well done, a timeless story of biological and spiritual entanglement, and of love, completely worthy of the bold cover created by Deranged Doctor Design.

Here is a small excerpt from Saving Aran. Enjoy!

Between where they stood and the village, the forest opened up, and on a slight rise stood a man. He was of middle age, his black hair salted with grey. His vest was beaded in light and dark blue, and blue beads adorned the fringes of his dark pants. When he turned toward them, a blue crystal at his temple flashed in the sunlight. A seer!

The man stood straight and tall, his hands loosely holding a staff that extended from the ground to well above his head. Alternately rough and smooth, the staff had a slight bend as if it reached for something, and green leaves adorned a cluster of sprigs at its top. The wood of the staff gleamed in a rainbow of colors. It was the largest piece of worked khena wood Cort had ever seen.

Neder glanced at Cort, then nodded slightly as if acknowledging something someone had said to him. “It’s Tirei,” he said. “He’s the headman of my village, and a seer. He’s the one you’ll need to talk with about becoming a hunter.”

Neder set off down the hill. Cort followed him, his heart lifting, now that the end of his mission was finally in sight.

When they reached the older man, Neder introduced Cort. Tirei greeted him politely, and Cort managed a polite response, but he could barely tear his gaze from Tirei’s staff, which seemed to glow with a special light. Seen this close, it was even more remarkable than from a distance, dancing with sparks of an inner fire. His hand twitched with the desire to reach toward it.

“It is living wood,” Tirei said, following Cort’s gaze. “Would you like to touch it?”

‘Living wood’ was a good name for it. Colors and patterns swam like fish in its translucent grain. Cort didn’t trust himself to speak. He swallowed hard and nodded.

Tirei spread out his hands on the staff to open a large space between them. “Go ahead,” he said, with the kind of encouraging nod he might give to a small child trying something for the first time.

Cort stretched out his hand and took hold of the staff, then gasped in astonishment. The wood seemed alive in more ways than one. It was as if the staff had actively taken hold of his own hand. It was warm, and Cort could feel its strength. Vitality flowed down his arm and seemed to send sparks inward to his heart. He felt he had the power to do anything, to rescue Dilia, to succeed. His other arm felt weak by comparison, and so he placed his other hand on the staff just above the first. The feeling was utterly exhilarating.

“How do you ever put this staff down?” he said.

“It’s not difficult,” Tirei answered. Cort met the seer’s eyes. They were a soft, light brown, and his expression was filled with something serious, like sorrow or sympathy. “With the staff of the living wood comes great responsibility. Sometimes it’s good to put such responsibility aside.”

As had happened too often since he came to this forest, Cort failed to understand. His face must have betrayed his confusion, for the seer added, “While we hold this staff together, neither you nor I can lie to the other, and we will hold onto it until the staff lets us go. Now listen to me. I am Tirei-sunar of the clan of the hawk, instrument of the whynywir, seer, head of this village, and the father of five. I have lived here my entire life. Now tell me about yourself.”

“My name is Cort.” Cort felt terribly self-conscious. “I am city-born and clanless.” He lifted his chin slightly as he spoke, defying the seer to reject him. “I don’t live in the city anymore. I don’t know where I live. And, Tirei, even without the staff I wouldn’t have lied to you.”

Tirei nodded. “I know that—now. But without the staff, I wouldn’t have been sure. Now tell me about your name.”

“My name? But I already told you,” he said. “It’s Cort. I was named after my father.”

“But ‘Cort’ is not a forest name,” said the older man.

“No, I guess not. Why should it be? I’m not a forest person. His name was something else. Longer.”  Cort frowned, trying to get it just right. “Something like Cort-anaran—and so is mine. But no one wants to deal with a long name like that, so no one ever calls me that.”

The older man’s eyes went distant for a moment, as if he were considering something complicated. After a moment of silence, he asked, “Corodh-an-Aran?”

“What?” Cort tried to move his hands to a more comfortable position, but they were as stuck as if they had been glued to the staff.

“Could his name have been Corodh-an-Aran?”

“Yes, I guess that sounds about right. The way you forest people pronounce the old words is a bit different from how we say them in the city.”

“More correct,” said Tirei.

“I guess. Yes, probably; that would make sense.”

“Corodh-an-Aran.” The older man drew out the syllables like a benediction.

“Does it mean anything to you?”

“You don’t know what it means?” 

“Should I?”

The seer sighed. “‘Corodh’ is a fine old word but it’s fallen out of common usage. You might say, ‘justice,’ but that’s not exactly right. It has the flavor of being what one is meant to be, doing what one is meant to do, having what one is meant to have. The rightness of things, and also setting things right. A good word. ‘An’ and ‘aran,’ you probably know. Of the forest, or for it. This whole world.”

“Setting things right for Aran? For our world?”  The idea pleased Cort. He stood a little straighter.

“Yes, that’s part of it. The forest being and having what she is meant to have. The one who makes sure that happens. Who sets things right for our world.”

Cort smiled. “I like that,” he said. Then, after thinking about it, he added, “Still, it’s only a name.”

“An ancient one,” said the seer. “A good one. And why have you come here, Cort?”

“To become a hunter, like Neder.”

Tirei raised a quizzical eyebrow and glanced at Neder. Standing at Cort’s side, almost out of the range of his sight, the hunter nodded. “But why?” the seer asked.

“To save my friend Dilia, who is like a sister to me,” Cort replied. “More than a sister. My father and mother are dead. My home has been burned down. But Dilia is in the city or on the base somewhere, captive, and I intend to rescue her. It’ll be dangerous. I can’t do it alone. I’ll need a kiri.” He swallowed and added, “Probably no one’s ever hunted in the city before, but I intend to do it, and I’ll succeed, too. And—I didn’t know this at first, but now I do—when I’ve rescued Dilia, I want to bring her back here to the khenaran, and I still want to be a hunter then.”

“This will be decided by the whynywir,” said the seer.

It wasn’t quite a rejection, but it was far from the agreement Cort would have liked. “I understand that, but you’re a seer! You talk with them directly, so you must have some influence with them. Will you help me?”

Again Tirei exchanged glances with Neder. Then he gave Cort a slight, sad smile,  suddenly looking weary. “I will do what I feel is right for you, Cort-anaran. For you and for all of Aran.”