Birk Aaland is a refugee from Earth's tyrannical government. He finds himself stranded on an undiscovered planet, which seems to be inhabited. Further exploration reveals the fantastic cities of the planet to be long deserted, yet still fully functional. Birk finds the cities to be perfectly maintained by the robot servants of the former inhabitants, and so he becomes the marooned king of an isolated kingdom of machines. His life away from earth is a lonely one and he spends eleven years without any human contact or companionship, tortured by memories of his former life on Earth and increasingly unable to imagine returning to it. Then Birk's fitful peace is shattered when a spaceship crashes on his planet, and the sole survivor is a woman named Michi Nakamura, who is not about to accept a fate in Birk's solitary world.
Author
Born in Philadelphia in 1947, Stephen Goldin has lived in California since 1960. He received a Bachelor’s degree in Astronomy from UCLA and worked as a civilian space scientist for the U.S. Navy for a few years after leaving college, but has made his living as a writer/editor most of his life. His first wife was fellow author Kathleen Sky, with whom he co-wrote the first edition of the highly acclaimed nonfiction book The Business of Being a Writer . His current wife is fellow author Mary Mason. So far they have co-authored two books in the Rehumanization of Jade Darcy series. He served the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America as editor of the SFWA Bulletin and as the organization’s Western Regional Director. He has lived with cats all his adult life. Artistically, he enjoys Broadway musicals and surrealist art. Philosophically, he is an atheist. Learn more about him at his Web site. . Many of his books can be bought through his online bookstore, Parsina Press.
