Well, I’ve finally released one of the stories I had in my backlog, a planetary-romance-style space opera story about the last days of a mysterious jungle planet, as told through the eyes of a mail-order bride who has a rather…rocky relationship with her titular husband. In case you can’t tell, it’s much like “The Naked Jungle” but set in a spacefaring far future, right down to the tough-as-nails planter, the somewhat-creepy and distant natives (who nevertheless turn out to be far more receptive to the woman than to the man, even to the point of taking the woman on a jaunt to an ice-giant planet where they go deep into the atmosphere and fetch a diamond from the diamond rain for a newborn mermaid baby…yes, the natives are mermaids), and the dread menace of the “mara bunta”; ants in the movie, aliens in my story. Intrigued? Here’s the blurb:
The jungle: savage enough even in our own time and on our own planet, but a jungle on an alien planet thousands of years into the spacefaring future? Only the boldest or the most forsaken attempt to colonize such a hostile planet, its beaches the only home for the vampire worms, raised for their silk by the most daring of humans, assisted by mermaids from the seas, exiled for a crime too terrible to speak; the very air so filled with argon lightning crackles constantly against the eerie purple glow of aurora during the long nights, the ground itself host to a dread race of aliens, who’ve sensed ’tis time to awaken and devour their world and anything…anyone, caught on the surface. Into the last days of this most thunderous and treacherous of planets steps a hapless bride, bent on uncovering the secrets of her new world…
Intrigues you more? Then you can read up on my blog posts about the story (my first and my second), or, you know, buy the novella on Amazon and actually read it for yourself. 😀 It’s just $2.99 for the Kindle version and $6.99 for the paperback version. Check it out!