Flower-of-Sands
The Extraordinary Adventures of a Female Astronaut
Following her sojourn on Earth, Flower-of-Sands returns to her home planet Liberty Primary in the Large Magellanic Cloud – presided over by the Galactic Confederacy of Liberated Worlds – when a fault develops in her spaceship's intergalactic drive, and she stays in stasis for over eight hundred years. She awakens to a futuristic, ultra-advanced society dominated by a sentient technology called the Field, which meets all individual desires effortlessly, a brave sparkling world which has lost the very concept of adventure.
An essential requirement for membership of the Galactic Confederacy of Liberated Worlds is a thousand years of absence from war and crime. Earth has applied for membership and, for the most part, fulfils these requirements. But a string of strange disappearances harbingers a return to war and crime and throws doubt on Earth’s suitability for membership.
Aware of Flower-of-Sand's craving for action, Liberty's authorities give her the task of investigating these disappearances. The Field reveals that the trail leads beyond the Milky Way and the Large Magellanic Cloud to the M33, the Spinning Wheel Galaxy.
At last Flower-of-Sands has the adventure she craves, but there is a price. To follow the mysterious trail, she must first obtain the deep intergalactic drives left to the Confederacy by a great race from a distant expanse of the cosmos. And here her problems and adventures begin, leading to a universe of peril, alien civilisations, romance, sacrifice, incredible worlds, humour, friendship, and a full-on love affair with a female android.
From 29th century Afghanistan to Pluto and its moon Charon. From space stations as large as cities to distant worlds where an intergalactic criminal cartel traffics an entire population, this is an odyssey through the human spirit and beyond, where nothing is what it seems.
For LBBT readers: this novel contains several relationships which are sympathetic to the LGBT community, including the central love affair and subplot. The character of Flower-of-Sands evolved while writing the novel, and this seemed to happen naturally. To describe it, more would be to create a spoiler. Nevertheless, this novel is not putting itself out there as LGBT fiction, but as a story which moved naturally in that direction on more than one occasion. I can also make similar observations with respect of my second novel, Countdown to Apocolypse.