Inigo Press

The Terraformed Earth series continues with Terraformed Earth – Discovery.

In the distant thirty-third century, Earth is a Holocene paradise after an ancient genocide and centuries of environmental remediation. The gene-modified Young rule the Seventeen Cities, home to the tiny remnant of human survivors. The Young are currently debating whether to exterminate humanity entirely when the biosphere is fully healed.

Ignatius Ryan, a Jesuit priest banished by his church to the future in cryosleep, sought only to survive and restore his flagging faith. His arrival upended the Young’s carefully sculpted world.

Ignatius, his lover Morna, and their daughter Iris barely managed to escape Selloi and Brunna, rulers of the city of S’Loo. With a tiny band of refugees, they set out for sanctuary in Kaycee, the one city on Earth not controlled by the Young.

But Kaycee is not the refuge they had been led to believe. They take shelter in a cavern nearby, hoping to find a way to evade the pervasive control of the Young.

In the forest south of Kaycee, they find a group of humans living a primitive lifestyle beyond the control of the Young. Faced with a choice of whether to join this tribe, itself liable to extermination if they are discovered, or return to S’Loo and the Young, they opt for the city.

Their return leads to an event no one expects. Morna finds herself on trial before a tribunal of the Young led by Ansan, at eight hundred years of age the oldest of the Young. In the face of mounting evidence against her, Ignatius must find a way to protect Morna and convince Ansan that the future of humanity and the Earth are not incompatible.

In May 2022 I expanded into two new distribution channels. The first was Barnes and Noble, where I put up November Skies, Leaving Acadia, and Martian Requiem.
The second venue is new. Book-blip.com is a new storefront for eBooks and offered free promotional advertising of new titles. It’s early days, but I’m sanguine about my prospects.
Check them out. As always, reviews are appreciated.

Today Amazon notified me that my novel Terraformed Earth – New Millennium is available for purchase in both Kindle and paperback formats.

I started this journey in 1986 when I began commuting between Kansas City and Baltimore for a new job. On the weekly flights I started the novel that became New Millennium. After we moved to Baltimore in 1988 life conspired to keep me away from the book, although I never stopped thinking about it.

In 2016, after I retired, I found a 5-1/4″ floppy disk with the text on it. Sadly, the disk was no longer readable. Then I found a faded paper copy of about 24,000 words. I scanned it in using my printer. The resulting text took almost as long to clean up as if I had typed it in by hand, but I ended up with a usable copy.

I managed to flesh out the plot, but the characters were another matter. I took a writing class online through our local community college. Then another class. I joined an online critique group called critters.org. I’ve heard people disparage the group, but it was a big help to me. Then I found Area 42, an online writers’ workshop, that provides mutual critique in a supportive environment. It’s been a great place to grow in.

After generating a first scene in a writing course, I wrote and published another novel, Asteroid Gambit. Think Casablanca in space with asteroids and a Martian rebellion. I wrote over a dozen short stories and struggled to get them published. Thankfully, all of my short stories eventually found a home.

I began several other novels: Fire in the Sky, a prequel to Asteroid Gambit; Terraformed Earth – Discovery, a sequel to New Millennium; Watanabe’s Hammer, about a war between aliens in the outer reaches of our Solar System; and Thorium Blues, a sequel to Asteroid Gambit.

I came to realize the real action in New Millennium started in chapter six, so I reluctantly killed my darlings and took out the first five chapters. The first four I turned into a short story, Terraformed Earth – Departure, first published in the anthology Unbound III – Goodbye Earth, now available in Kindle format. The fifth chapter became my short story Terraformed Earth – Creation.

At long last I’ve come to the end of the road. The first three stories in the Terraformed Earth series, Departure, Creation, and New Millennium are all available on Amazon. Discovery, the next part of the story, should appear later this year.

My development as an author is still a work in progress, but I hope you’ll enjoy meeting Ignatius and learning about a dystopian future unlike any other.

In the course of writing Terraformed Earth – New Millennium I wrote several chapters before the main action starts. I realized this was deferring the real story too long. so I cut the first four chapters. I rewrote them as a standalone short story. Mirabile dictu!, I sold it to a Canadian publisher for inclusion in Unbound III- Goodbye Earth, an anthology where it goes it goes by an earlier title, IX – Departure. I just reread it and was really happy with the story. You might be as well.

Since it’s been a couple of years since Departure appeared, I’ve published it as a standalone Kindle story under the title Terraformed Earth – Departure.

You can order the Kindle short here and the anthology here.

Since New Millennium postulates a world with little trace of humanity in the year 3261 CE, I wrote a short story to explain how this might have happened. The result was Terraformed Earth – Creation.

What would you sacrifice to restore the environment? Seventeen climate researchers sacrificed their firstborn.

Their parents genetically modified the Young to live for centuries, increased their intelligence far beyond the rest of humanity, and took away their ability to reproduce.

As adolescents, the Young have the tools to change the world. The solution they craft will last millennia. But the side effects are killers.

Terraformed Earth – Creation is available for pre-order on Amazon.

Thirty years ago I started my first science fiction novel. I had no idea what I was getting into. Today Terraformed Earth – New Millennium went live on Amazon for pre-order!

Jesuit priest Ignatius Ryan, was banished by his church to the future in cryosleep to quiet a theological controversy, He returns to Earth after a millennium in deep space to find a constellation of military satellites orbiting silently above a pristine environment with little sign of humanity.

On the surface he meets a tiny remnant of humanity locked in a struggle with their gene-modified rulers for control of Earth and their future. To each side he represents both opportunity and threat.

When Grace, the AI who shepherded him through centuries, hacks into a military satellite and fires its laser, the rulers fear Ignatius’ power and decree his death.

Ignatius, feeling abandoned by God and betrayed by the Church, is seduced by Morna, a survivor who is not what she seems. He dreams of a quiet life with her but cannot ignore the events that led to humanity’s disappearance,

Seeking to understand an ancient genocide, Ignatius raises questions no one wants answered. As he struggles to recover his lost faith and find purpose in this new century, he finds love, uncovers dark secrets, faces betrayal, and fights for the life of a daughter he never imagined.

You can order New Millennium here.

In my Worlds of Sol future terraforming Mars becomes a project of most of the nations of Earth. Mars becomes the focus of human space activity on the outer Solar System. Learn more here.

The regolith on the Moon contains, among other things, a huge reservoir of oxygen to support human life. Other minerals included in lunar regolith are silicon, iron, calcium, aluminum, and magnesium. Accessing them requires an industrial presence on the Moon. Initially this will have to come from Earth, at substantial cost. Once this cost has been borne, oxygen and other raw materials will be available at the bottom of a much weaker gravity well than Earth’s. Manufacturing in space for use in space cuts cost dramatically

I’ve been writing short stories as well as novels for a few years now. In 2018 I started getting a little traction. Some of my stories were set so far in the future I wondered if anyone would be willing to publish them. 

A couple of years ago I visited the Salvador Dali museum in Tampa, Florida and was astonished at some of the art on display there, going back to before we were human. I left wondering what an alien might have thought of the museum. With that in mind I wrote The Museum at the End of Time, set in the distant future when the sun has evolved the point where it has wiped life off the face of Earth. On the Moon, still orbiting Earth, a collective alien mind finds a museum of lost humanity.

Last summer Z-Sky put out a call for “eschatological” fiction set in the far future. To my surprise, they chose to publish Museum in their inaugural edition. You should check it out. https://zsky.org/journal/

Emboldened, I sent them Volare, a flash fiction piece written on a canvas that spans billions of years. I was fortunate that they also liked that one and plan to publish it in their Winter edition.

However strange your story is, there’s someone who will be entranced by it. Don’t stop writing.

Ignatius Xavier Ryan, SJ, is the protagonist of my novel Terraformed Earth – New Millennium. Ignatius was born in 2044 to Edmund Ryan and Xaviera Torres in Philadelphia, PA. Edmund was an American soldier who lost his life in a nameless border war in Azerbaijan in 2059. Xaviera was the rebellious daughter of a wealthy Catholic family who married Edmund, a college boyfriend, despite her family’s disapproval.

While Ignatius was a boy Edmund was frequently away on deployment. When he was not, Edmund and Ignatius spent  lot of time camping in the Ozarks, near Edmund’s hometown of Kansas City. Ignatius learned a lot about woodland survival, which will stand him in good stead in ways he cannot imagine.

During Edmund’s frequent absences, Xaviera and Ignatius led a happy life. When they learned of Edmund’s death, Xaviera felt compelled to control Ignatius tightly lest she lose him as well. As he grew, Ignatius was drawn to the Society of Jesus by the faith he shared with her. He joined the Jesuits at least in part to escape his mother’s suffocating embrace. Her family supported him and Xaviera gave him her reluctant approval.

Ignatius spent fifteen happy years in the Society, being ordained and receiving a Ph.D. in linguistics. He was in his first year of a faculty appointment at Georgetown University when he contracted cancer. His cancer advanced rapidly and Ignatius returned to the Novitiate in Wernersville, PA where he had been a novice. He made his peace with God and was prepared to die.

Xaviera was not as ready as Ignatius to accept his death. She hired two men to kidnap Ignatius and deliver him to a research facility in Philadelphia where she had been funding Dr. Bruno Ghirardi’s research in cryogenic preservation of humans. Dr. Ghirardi agreed to preserve Ignatius as one of his first patients.

Ignatius was awakened 75 years later by Dr. Ghirardi’s granddaughter. She had cured his cancer but Dr. Ghirardi, his mother, and everyone he had ever known was dead. Worse, his reanimation caused a theological crisis regarding the doctrine of resurrection. To defuse the controversy Cardinal Bienvenista, the Pope’s camerlengo, ordered Ignatius to reenter cryogenic sleep and spend the next millennium in a spacecraft on a deep cometary orbit, crewed by an artificial intelligence named Grace. Ignatius appealed this assignment to the Pope, a spiritual figure who asked Ignatius to carry the Gospel message forward into an uncertain future. Caught between abandonment and banishment, Ignatius chose to travel into a future without faith or hope.

Ignatius and Grace return in 3261 to an environmental paradise on Earth with little sign of humanity. New Millennium details Ignatius’ life in the far future, in a world of orbiting laser battle stations and the Seventeen Cities, partially buried centers for environmental remediation scattered across the globe. After descending to Earth in the Ozark forest near S’Loo, one of the seventeen cities, Ignatius meets Cats, young breeders for S’Loo, Engineers, managers of S’Loo’s infrastructure and the Young, genetically enhanced post-humans who control S’Loo. The Young of the seventeen cities have largely restored the biosphere and are discussing whether to eliminate humanity entirely when their plans reach fruition.

Ignatius, his faith in tatters, hopes only to survive. Against his will, he finds himself compelled to try to change a world rich in life but devoid of compassion. To do that, first he must change himself.

Terraformed Earth – New Millennium is now available for pre-order on Amazon.