♂: The NOVEL
I have just finished posting the final chapter of my novel, ♂: The NOVEL. I invite any comments, criticisms, etc. Just tag me or email me at eddiehchrist@gmail.com.
Below is a blurb prepared for my queries:
How could we misplace an entire planet? One moment it is there, the next it is not, as if it were a private thing between Mars and someone else...as if no one on Earth were permitted to know why. So begins ♂: THE NOVEL. Mars in the 25th century, looking back: long ago, Earth colonized Mars; later Earth terraformed Mars. But longer ago, Mars didn’t need Earth’s help, thank you. And now it has simply vanished, as if it had never existed.
A nearly terrestrial band around the equator is home to New Mars Colony, ready to expand and populate the Red Planet, going full tilt with corporate and governmental backing from the Mother Planet. But strange things start appearing as terraforming proceeds and Mars becomes more Earth-like. Supposed mineral formations, used as industrial staples, metamorphose into ferropods. What are they and why are they killing us? Also, there are ambulating plants--if that is what they are. Why does the illegal chemical within them act as a novel neurotransmitter in the human brain? And the songs riding on the winds through the canyons--the Sonotomes, brilliant recordings laid down by the ancient Martians into the ferric oxide of the geology--contrast with an unexplainable total absence of fossilized remains. Are they telling us something? Something long hidden, something terrifying--or something beautiful?
As questions sprout like seedlings after a shower, Earth sends her best and brightest and perhaps her somewhat flawed to research and to understand. Dr. Renee Niemann is a conflicted veterinarian, unanchored in life now that her aging loved ones have declined the life extension she so recklessly snatched for herself. She is assigned to the Veterinary Studies Division on Mars to explore why ferropods snap into the heads of people but not of animals and begins to wonder if there is a ferropod with her name on it. There are machines that question the difference between “what-is” and “what-is-not,” and why “what-is” is, and why “what-is-not” isn’t. They are machines that can leap across eons for the answers. The ṺberCollider has isolated the exotic chronoton particle, that quantum state vector that assigns time to all things. The Chronarchy tasks its Chairperson, Gavin Atilano, with using it to engender the temporal reconciliation that will reconcile the colonists’ present with the time epoch three billion years earlier so that the living Martians of that time can be brought to us. Temporal reconciliation, however, is an experiment in progress and involves unforeseen, bizarre consequences. (What could go wrong?) Mare Mickal, the eight-year old daughter of Drs. Deniz and Evan Mickal, pretends to be the Princess of Mars, but has within her the solution to the temporal paradox that otherwise will doom either the Martians or the humans.
Interwoven into the scientific drama is a political and military crisis perpetrated by some who only want what they can plunder with two hands. The treachery of the Nations of Earth liaison, Denton Walsh, subverts his mission on Mars toward despotic independence from Earth, perverting the vision of taking the best Earth has to offer another world into something else entirely.
"♂: The Novel" is an existential thriller that journeys from what is to what has never been to what can be and far beyond. It tells the story of the temporal destiny for the future of Mankind.