My new sci-fi romance novel “Nereogenesis” is out in ebook and paperback! Yay! What is “Nereogenesis”? Compared to my earlier novels and stories it’s certainly the most enigmatic. You’ll have to find out for yourself what it means, but as for what it is I’ll let my blurb have the first word:
In a future where the whole solar system is now within man’s reach, a rich party girl named after the distant moon of Ariel finally realizes a lifelong dream of visiting her namesake world herself. Setting out with her closest friends on an expedition there, they penetrate its icy crust and emerge into its vast ocean, inky-black in the darkness, their only company being the decaying ruins of abandoned mining facilities, vehicles, habitats, stimulating the telling of ghost stories to each other on their submarine as if gathered around a campfire in the primeval forest.
But the ghost stories become real as the world around them wakes up and makes it known they are unwelcome there. Meeting the enigmatic and strangely attractive mastermind of these ghostly apparitions, Ariel will uncover the truth behind her namesake world’s terrors and meet her destiny.
Sound interesting? I hope so. Ariel charters a nuclear pulse ship, complete with a forested habitat no less, and takes a weeks-long trip to Ariel, one of the moons of Uranus, which, following real-world speculation, has a liquid water ocean deep under the icy surface.
Part of the backstory of this novel, my seventh book by the way, is that huge mining interests set up facilities in the icy crust of Ariel, habitation bubbles in the ice filled with air and the like complete with full-fledged habitats, and in the ocean, submarines and submersible habitats, as well as drilling rigs into the core itself at the ocean floor. The profitability of this endeavor waned due to competition from the asteroids and comets so they were all abandoned one by one.
The Hermit of Ariel they encounter, the mastermind of the seemingly supernatural terrors of the deep, is the descendant of one of these miners who was presumed dead during the evacuation; always wanting to live an isolated and hidden existence free from the prying eyes and dangers of human civilization, he appropriates the abandoned infrastructure.
When he meets Ariel he is shown a good time in their submarine, and takes her and her friends to his own habitat, where they will get to know each other, Ariel and this latter-day Captain Nemo, despite everything, falling in love with each other, hence the story’s place in the romance genre, as this part of the plot takes up most of the story. Will they? Won’t they? How will they? You’ll find out if you read it through to the end; at 53,000 words (129 pages according to Amazon) and $4.99 it’s not like it’s all that long or all that costly, so why not take the chance and join the select few who have so far had the pleasure of reading an Adamas Nemesis novel?
This novel in terms of word length is almost exactly the same length as my hitherto shortest novel “Dear Future Me” (“A Trip to Starlit Spa” is much shorter, but that’s a short story, not a novel), so basically tied for my shortest. That helped the time from start to completion to be less than two months.
Next month marks a year since I started writing “The Hunt for Count Gleichen’s Treasure”, so it seems one novel every two months is about the pace I can maintain, having written six novels and one short story during that year. I anticipate my pace might become somewhat slower than usual over the next couple weeks, but nevertheless I will likely be in the full swing of writing my next novel, my second story set in the far future and sort of a follow-up to “Warp Dawn”, centering on a girl named Calypso and her journey from her isolated spaceship to being a courtesan of a crystal city spinning in space near a black hole.
Quite a few new worldbuilding elements and aesthetic details will be introduced in my next novel, and I’m really looking forward to writing it! In the meantime, I encourage you to check out “Nereogenesis” as well as my other six books.