An Alien's Quest (Archives of Varok) - Softcover

Neeper, Cary

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1622220226 ISBN 13: 9781622220229

Publisher: Penscript Publishing House, LLC, 2016

Synopsis

Only two decades after first contact, even Earth's people know of Haralahn, the great-fish spiritual leader on distant Ellason. Shawne Oran-ElConn-Grey determines to seek his guidance, as she struggles to tame a haunting disillusionment that followed her home from Earth. Her quest for meaning draws everyone she loves away to the Kuiper Belt and into a genetic mystery on the watery home planet of the ellls. The fourth novel in Cary Neeper's Archives of Varok, An Alien’s Quest completes the story of Shawne and her mixed-species family as they search for answers in Ellason's wild seas.

An avid proponent of sustainability and steady-state economics since the 1970s, Cary Neeper studied zoology, chemistry and religion at Pomona College and medical microbiology at U. Wisconsin - Madison. Her other writing includes articles on exobiology at Astronaut.com, a column on animal sentience, and two musical science fiction comedies. Cary also paints landscapes in acrylics, including the cover art for the Archives of Varok series.

About this title

From the Author:

A new review from Frank Kaminsky of Resilience.org--a great critique and beautiful summary of the  story and philosophical treatment at resilience.org/stories/2017-11-16/an-aliens-quest/.From Novel Finds: In this book the mixed family sets aside their focus on solutions for Earth's socio-economic future to deal with a tangle of Ellasonian problems, their own evolving relationships, and Shawne's (the character's)personal growth. Underneath all the action, the story is a search for faith and hope, outside both science and organized religion.
 
We had a hard time finding a genre or an award category for this one. Certainly not science fiction, in spite of the title (the human Shawne is the Alien). On Novel Finds we called it Contemporary Fiction. In no way does it deal with scientific issues or speculation or projection. The species, characters and astronomy are as realistic as I could imagine--even the space travel, with all its horrific physiological problems and enormous time and energy requirements, which writers of scifi have tended to ignore or downplay. The aliens are stand-ins for animal life that force us to review who we are as human beings.
 
True, AN ALIEN'S QUEST is fiction set in the near future,but it is very down-to-earth in its exploration of meaning and reasons for hope. Perhaps life is not just one big meaningless accident. The core of the story is about the need and the search for the meaning of existence, including ours.

About the Author:

An avid proponent of sustainability and steady-state economics since the 1970s, Cary Neeper studied zoology, chemistry and religion at Pomona College and medical microbiology at U. Wisconsin - Madison. Her other writing includes articles on exobiology at Astronaut.com, a column on animal sentience for the Los Alamos Daily Post, and two musical science fiction comedies. Cary also paints landscapes in acrylics, including the cover art for the Archives of Varok series.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penscript Publishing House, LLC
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1622220226
• ISBN 13: 9781622220229
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 274
• Illustrator: Neeper Cary