Hello, bonjour, guten tag, my name is James B. Mielke—take the ‘B’ and call me Ben, please. I’m writing because I have recently completed my first novel, a work of science fiction. I call it Cardomon—Mellisa Shannon, a History and a Tragedy, and it has almost 154,000 words. Let me tell you about it:
We are in a far future, where
‘Earth’ is merely a word for soil, and people colonize new planets every day.
It’s all by the book, no surprises, just stick to the plan. But if your plan
doesn’t account for a native fungus that consumes human flesh in moments, or a
volcanic eruption that obliterates ninety percent of your population base, or
the fundamentally predatory nature of the human species, you may experience
difficulties. Meanwhile, families
bond, babies arrive, people make love, they make music and they make whiskey.
We meet scientists, astrologers and lumberjacks, vigilantes, aristocrats and
athletes, beloved teachers, runaway slaves and psychopaths. And a mysterious
new intelligence watches.
Starting with arrival on the planet
and construction of a Firstown and finishing with a ragged battle for freedom,
Cardomon brews numerous threads and characters through experiences silly and
sobering and examines the foundation of civilization, and its lapse.
The first of an intended four part
series that documents five hundred years of human settlement and the evolution
of the mysterious being—a planet wide fungus awakened into sentience by
encountering people. Part One, Mellisa Shannon, follows the arc of a polarizing
pioneer colonist and sees the establishment of two rival communities linked
through a shared school. They clash on the athletic field, in wilderness
conflict and over a development project imported by a Galactic merchant, a
slave trader.
Part two will take off running in
the aftermath of the first part’s action and turns its lens upon the
