Book of the Month June 2024
Day 115 on an Alien World - someone needs to stay alive to call for help
This month’s book is Day 115 on an Alien World.
This novel was the result of a thought exercise that got me through the early days of my daughter’s life. In my sleep deprived state I didn’t have the bandwidth for much beyond child care, but I did have time to think about all the ways surviving on an alien world could go wrong.
Here’s the premise I started with:
You’re in an atmospheric suit on an alien world and there’s a leak in it. Alarms blare as your bubble of breathable air bleeds away. Slap a patch on the leak and you’d be good to go. Mark Watney managed it – but you’re not this lucky. What if the suit is also covered in mud? How do you find the leak then? Muddy gloves wouldn’t get far in cleaning the suit off. But it still could be worse, what if the mud is about to freeze? What if you’re completely alone?
Eventually, I started writing the story down and over the course of a few years it became the science fiction thriller it is now.
Here's my favourite review so far (from Amazon): “I'm a sucker for well-written sci-fi adventure novels, and boy, did this one deliver!”
And here’s the description:
A barren world. A crashed colony ship. A saboteur at work.
After a tarnished military record leaves her unable to find work on Earth, Margo is hunting for a fresh start. A colonizing mission heading to a new world creates the perfect opportunity—or at least that’s what she thinks.
Strapped into a crashing colony ship, she realizes how wrong she is.
On the ground of their destination planet, the straight forward colonizing mission becomes a scramble for survival. Her new world is harsh and unforgiving. Accidents keep happening. Too many to blame on bad luck alone. The trail of evidence leads Margo to a startling conclusion—one of her fellow colonists is a saboteur.
Tomorrow is the colony’s first communications window with Earth and their only chance to send a message home.
With the fate of the colony at stake, will Margo stop the saboteur before it’s too late?
Grab a copy, it’s free for all.
And if you are interested in another story set in this universe, stay tuned as Lunar Escape will be serialized here over the summer.