A Sci-Fi Romance Novel
by Kelly Jensen
Survival is hard
enough in the outer colonies—what chance does love have?
Life can be harsh and lonely in the outer colonies, but
miner-turned-farmer Abraham Bauer is living his dream, cultivating crops that
will one day turn the unforgiving world of Alkirak into paradise. He wants
more, though. A companion—someone quiet like him. Someone to share his days,
his bed, and his heart.
Gael Sonnen has never seen the sky, let alone the sun. He’s
spent his whole life locked in the undercity beneath Zhemosen, running from one
desperate situation to another. For a chance to get out, he’ll do just about
anything—even travel to the far end of the galaxy as a mail-order husband. But
no plan of Gael’s has ever gone smoothly, and his new start on Alkirak is no
exception. Things go wrong from the moment he steps off the shuttle.
Although Gael arrives with unexpected complications, Abraham
is prepared to make their relationship work—until Gael’s past catches up with
them, threatening Abraham’s livelihood, the freedom Gael gave everything for,
and the love neither man ever hoped to find.
Welcome to Alkirak
In To See the Sun,
Bram chooses Gael to be his companion based on a short HV (holo video) at a
site called Heart Companions. There’s not a lot of detail about Gael’s profile,
except that he’s looking for a single male companion. But it was the video that
sold him. Bram was entranced.
For his part, Bram’s looking for a life partner. Missing
from his profile would be some vital details about the planet where he lives,
though. He included pictures of his farm. Close up pictures. His wind turbines,
the small animals he keeps. Rows of soybeans and the small hobby garden he
keeps.
But Bram knew better than to include a picture of the land
adjacent to his farm—mostly because his farm occupies a wide terrace in a deep
crevasse. There is no land adjacent. Just a void. Below the crevasse, poisonous
mists swirl. And above, on the sunbaked plateau, the air is too thin to breathe
without the aid of a mask.
Why did I have Bram entice Gael out to a barely habitable
planet on the far edge of the galaxy? Well, for one thing, I thought it was
funny, and one of my favorite scenes in the book is Gael’s reaction to learning
that Alkirak is not the paradise he thought it might be. But I also liked the
idea of setting this romance in a challenging environment. To See the Sun is a sweet love story—perhaps the loveliest I’ve
ever written. The contrast of a hot, dusty, and nearly airless planet could
only make it sweeter.
The inspiration for Alkirak came from a number of sources. I
have… let’s call it a fondness for inhospitable planets, which I’ve explored in
a number of other posts. In creating this planet, I drew on a couple of
favorites.
For the surface, I revisited Crematoria from The Chronicles of Riddick—sort of.
Rather than have the rising sun bring along with it a wave of lava, I made the
surface of Alkirak barely hospitable. You wouldn’t want to be up there at
midday, but when the sun is rising and setting, it’s just…warm. Okay, hot. And
you can’t really breathe, but you wouldn’t be instantly burned to a crisp.
The hope is that one day the atmosphere in the crevasses
will push upward and eventually envelop the planet, making the surface
habitable as well.
So, the crevasses. I could have set all the action beneath
the surface, in tunnels. Had the farms exist as variously protected
greenhouses. But I wanted to show a planet in the process of being terraformed.
Therefore, the farms had to be outside, necessitating the creating of a green
zone. I placed this about a third of the way down each crevasse, a couple of
kilometers below the plateau that makes up the surface of Alkirak. There is
flora in the crevasses, thickening to alien forests toward the bottom. There is
also water. In creating the first bubble of habitability, I proposed that the
mining process released a combination of gases that formed a stable atmosphere,
and that continued mining and farming would expand this atmosphere, pushing it
upward.
I based this on research done into terraforming Mars or like
environments by using lichen and by increasing the volume of greenhouse gases
in the atmosphere to create something like our ozone layer. My science isn’t
exact, but I wanted it to be close enough to be plausible.
The color of the sky is also based on Mars. The difference
in atmosphere (or almost complete lack of it) is what makes the inverse
colors—the corona of the sun being blue rather than a warmer shade of yellow or
orange, and the sky being a dull yellow rather than blue.
For the crevasses, I turned to T'ien Shan, from The Rise of Endymion. Dan Simmons is a
master of creating different and challenging environments. T’ien Shan is a
planet of mountains. There are no valleys, only seas of acid and poisonous gas,
meaning people have to live in the higher reaches. The peaks are crisscrossed
with steps and hanging walkways, making travel arduous and dangerous. I
borrowed only the poisonous gases, and decided that the deadly mix below the
habitable zone was probably a mixture of elements that were necessary, but too
concentrated in their current state.
The storms? They were entirely my own invention and happened
while I was in the process of writing. There’s a scene where Bram and Gael are
having a pretty deep conversation and I needed an interruption. Hello, weather.
Initially, I thought to show Gael as being terrified of the thunder and
lightning, but he’s just not that easily cowed. So I had the storms scoop
poison gas out of the depths of the crevasse instead.
(No characters were permanently… No one we really care about
was permanently… There’s a happy ever after, okay?)
I had a lot of fun building Alkirak. I enjoy designing
worlds in general—it’s one of the perks of writing speculative fiction. Some of
my more outlandish ideas might not be possible, but I generally find that with
enough research and imagination, you can make almost anything work!
If you’re interested in reading more about my world
building, look out for the post detailing Zhemosen, the city (and planet) where
Gael was born, and you can find a few pictures I used as inspiration on my Pinterest
board for To See the Sun.
About Kelly
If aliens ever do land on Earth, Kelly will not be prepared,
despite having read over a hundred stories of the apocalypse. Still, she will
pack her precious books into a box and carry them with her as she strives to
survive. It’s what bibliophiles do.
Kelly is the author of a number of novels, novellas and
short stories, including the Chaos
Station series, co-written with Jenn Burke. Some of what
she writes is speculative in nature, but mostly it’s just about a guy losing
his socks and/or burning dinner. Because life isn’t all conquering aliens and
mountain peaks. Sometimes finding a happy ever after is all the adventure we
need.
Thanks for hosting me today!
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