From the depths of the sea to the depths of space

“Searching for our origin” by Brian S. Pauls, 2025; Digital illustration created using Midjourney

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My novelette, An Illicit Mercy, is part of a new promotion in January: Strong Women.

80 short stories and novels, available at no cost.

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Will humanity come together to save a dying Earth?

Get your FREE copy of A Fading Star by Greg Hickey

Earth is dying. Ravaged by disease, hunger, climate change and world wars. Can humanity unite to avoid extinction?

In 2153, cancer was cured. In 2189, AIDS. It seemed like humanity was headed for the stars.

Global population soared, surpassing 24 billion. Then came the floods, washing over Bangkok, Buenos Aires, Mumbai, Jakarta, Dhaka and New Orleans. Then a fourth world war, with 289 million casualties. Frequent droughts plague Los Angeles, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Melbourne, Mexico City, São Paulo, Stockholm, Vienna and Moscow. Now humanity teeters on the brink of extinction.

A few individuals fight for our survival. A determined physicist. A brilliant oncologist. A team of daring astronauts. A small group of investors funds a desperate search for another habitable planet. But time is running out.

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This past July, Martin MacInnes won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for his novel In Ascension.

Hailing from Scotland, MacInnes won the Manchester Fiction Prize for his first short story, “Our Disorder,” in 2014. He received the Somerset Maugham Award in 2017 for his first novel, Infinite Ground. MacInnes is a former Royal Literary Fund fellow.

The website for Grove Atlantic, MacInnes’ U.S. publisher, describes In Ascension as follows:

Leigh grew up in Rotterdam, drawn to the waterfront as an escape from her unhappy home life and volatile father. Enchanted by the undersea world of her childhood, she excels in marine biology, travelling the globe to study ancient organisms. When a trench is discovered in the Atlantic ocean, Leigh joins the exploration team, hoping to find evidence of the earth’s first life forms – what she instead finds calls into question everything we know about our own beginnings.

Her discovery leads Leigh to the Mojave desert and an ambitious new space agency. Drawn deeper into the agency’s work, she learns that the Atlantic trench is only one of several related phenomena from across the world, each piece linking up to suggest a pattern beyond human understanding. Leigh knows that to continue working with the agency will mean leaving behind her declining mother and her younger sister, and faces an impossible choice: to remain with her family, or to embark on a journey across the breadth of the cosmos.

Questions or comments? Please share your thoughts!

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This month, I’m reading Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Ruin, the second book in his Hugo-Award winning Children of Time trilogy. I’m sharing my thoughts on Club Codex, where any Cosmic Codex subscriber can follow along, comment, or ask questions.

From this week’s post:

“Octopuses are by far a better choice than spiders. For one, octopuses are legitimately intelligent, and appear to even possess a sentient consciousness. At the same time, they're so different, they are commonly referred to [as] aliens right here on Earth.”

Click below to participate:

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My latest novelette, “Fire From Heaven,” now appears in Boundary Shock Quarterly 29: First Contact.

In the shadows of an alien world, terror awaits. On the radiation-blasted planet Janus, a team of explorers descends into Abbadon—an ancient mountain facility hiding unimaginable secrets. As they navigate bizarre chambers filled with cryptic carvings, they unleash a nightmare. But the true horror lies not in the alien ruins, but in the chilling implications of the team’s discovery.

Fire From Heaven is the sequel to my previous novelette, “Nasty, Brutish, and Short.”