Title
Alien Son: A Time Travel Science Fiction Adventure (Sons of Aran)
Author
G. S. Kenney
Genre
Science Fiction Romance, Teen & Young Adult Sci-fi Action & Adventure eBooks, Metaphysical Science Fiction eBooks, Colonization Science Fiction eBooks
Book Blurb
A time-travel knot full of twists spans two worlds and five millennia.
It began as a mission to save an unspoiled world, but people are going missing. Now it’s a desperate battle to survive.
Present day – 24th century Earth
Mikel Pelerin, a young scientist, dreams of an accomplishment worthy of his famous father, the Aran native who became a martyr to save his home planet. Mikel travels to Aran for the chance of a major scientific breakthrough—to meet the elusive whynywir, Aran’s true natives. But it all goes wrong, and now Mikel needs help.
Future – 33rd century Earth
Time-traveling historian Aiana discovers a holo of the most famous person in history, the 24th-century world redeemer Taerlin. The way he looks at her is decidedly personal. It speaks to her across centuries—she must find him. But time travel to Taerlin’s century on Earth is impossible, even in theory. Following a legend that Taerlin is from Aran, Aiana braves her university’s threats to cut off her funding and begins a millennia-long search.
Taerlin is Mikel.
When Mikel meets the mysterious time-traveler Aiana, he is fascinated by her, but she dares not reciprocate his growing love. Aiana knows he must follow his destiny—Taerlin’s destiny—to die in the events that shape both Earth and Aran.
Click “Look Inside” to start reading Alien Son and find out if Mikel and Aiana can find a future together.
Excerpt:
Reverend Guide Salvatore advanced the hologram frame by frame. His long, manicured forefinger stabbed the control button as if to keep it in its place. There was silence in the darkened conference room as the members of Aiana Kim’s thesis committee leaned forward, studying each frame, barely breathing.
Between one frame and the next, a young red-haired woman appeared in the holo.
Aiana caught her breath. Her hand went to her mouth and then subconsciously pushed a loose strand of her own red hair behind her ear. She placed the hand back into her lap and held it there with the other, more obedient one.
Aiana had seen this holo a dozen times, and the moment never failed to astonish her. To terrify her.
She was looking at herself—true to every detail, red hair gleaming and wild in the lamplit evening. This crystal-clear image of herself stood, in the holo, at the base of a statue that made the place easily identifiable, and the era. Aiana had never been there. Of course not. In all of history, this was one place and time no historian could travel to, not even in theory. But there she was in the holo, true to life, even the way she tucked her hair behind her ear. She was gathering a group of people tightly around her, apparently instructing them to keep close and hold hands.
“Incredible,” Salvatore muttered, bending over and squinting at the meter-high figures in the air where the conference table normally stood. A teacher and a scholar, he was the world’s leading expert on Taerlin’s life and the literature and folklore surrounding it. Except for the stole he wore, Salvatore looked more like a professor than an ordained Guide, his posture slightly hunched like a man who’d spent too much time poring over ancient texts, his dark hair thinning and going to grey. He walked around the miniature scene. Deep vertical lines folded the space between his eyebrows into clefts of concentration.
Only the occasional scraping of a chair as Salvatore stalked in front of someone marred the silence., Shaking his head slowly, Salvatore turned to look at Aiana. His eyes asked the question Aiana had been wondering about since the first time she saw this holo. Why her?
Salvatore turned back to the holo, and then looked at her again. He walked slowly around her as if she were one more media projection. Then he sighed, putting aside the unanswerable question.
He advanced the media.
The woman in the holo looked up, and the viewpoint shifted to include a young man who ran toward the gathered group. He was slender, but with the solid muscles and broad chest that seemed, like a gazelle, to be built for running. His red-and-white beaded vest flapped open; the breeze tousled his brown hair and riffled the downy white feathers tied to the ends of the thong that bound it. He held the hand of a boy who ran by his side. The boy’s eyes focused on the face of the man he ran with. The man met the eyes of the woman, and his expectant smile widened into wholehearted joy. His face shone like the sun after a late afternoon thunderstorm, turning the entire world to gold.
Salvatore froze the frame. He stared open-mouthed at the man. His breathing quickened, and he clasped his hand to his heart.
Aiana wondered whether the guide might be about to have an unfortunate cardiac event. Yes, that holo might do that to a religious person. The scene was captured so clearly that everyone in this room might have been present at the moment the hologram was made.
There was no mistaking the man. Without question, he was Taerlin.
She looked at the people around her, their faces lit in the glow of the holo images. Raj Smithjon, her advisor, stared as intently as the guide, his grey hair in its usual disarray as he ran his long fingers through it again and again. Maria Zhou, head of the History Department and of Aiana’s thesis committee, her black hair pulled severely into a bun that seemed to tighten the corners of her eyes into an expression of perpetual disapproval, frowned but did not look away. The two other members of Aiana’s committee crowded close by Zhou, Professors Hossen and Vikram, both of them with eyes large and mouths agape.
Aiana knew what she was going to have to ask these people, and her heart pounded in fear that they might deny her—and even more so, that they might say yes.
Aiana turned back to the holo images. She was no longer astonished at seeing him, not anymore, not after all the times she’d watched this holo. But the look that passed between the two of them still amazed her. Without a doubt, it was a look of complicity. And perhaps more.
If he had not been who he was, Aiana would have wanted to know the man who had looked at her like she was the most important person in his world.
But being who he was—meeting him would put her in a spotlight she’d do anything to avoid. Then again, it would make her career. A historian with first-hand experience of Taerlin! And she had to consider the likelihood that, since it had already happened, it was inevitable.
As the Guide advanced the media frame by slow frame, the man in the holo reached out to Aiana’s image, then paused. He looked off to his left. His mouth framed an “O” of—what? Surprise? Anger? Was he shouting something? And then he was bowled over in a blur of unexpected action. A few frames later, the blur resolved itself into a second man, crew-cut and long-jowled, scowling. Words were exchanged.
Aiana knew Old Standard pretty well—anyone studying this era had to—but she couldn’t lip-read it. The two men said something, all in slow motion as the Guide shakily single-stepped the frames. The people in the holo joined hands in a jagged line, with the red-haired woman at one end and the two men at the other. Within a few frames, the entire line of people stepped forward and—disappeared.
Oneiroportation. It must be. Discounting a miracle, there was no other explanation.
“It’s a miracle!” breathed the Guide. “The actual Blessed Ascension.” He made the sign of obeisance, fingertips to lips to heart.
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Author Biography
Author G. S. Kenney writes romantic speculative fiction novels. Her first science-fiction romance novel Freeing Eden, published by Soul Mate Publishing, was a 2018 RWA Golden Heart® finalist. The Last Lord of Eden and A Warrior of Eden, also in the Ascent of Eden series, are now also available.
G. S. Kenney started reading early, and never stopped. In kindergarten, drawn in by a book with a picture of three witches at a cauldron, she learned to read by starting with Shakespeare's Macbeth and is in awe of her mother's patience. Now she writes stories of her own (and still loves Shakespeare). Interested in many fields, she studied the “Great Books” at St. John’s College, architecture at Harvard, and financial planning at Boston University. She has also conducted post-doctoral research in psychology at the Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro, North Carolina, and developed software systems in use all over the world.
In addition to writing, G. S. Kenney is an avid photographer and world traveler, along with her husband, the love of her life. When not "on the road," they reside in Marin County, California, where a dream of having a lemon tree of their very own has somehow morphed into an entire citrus orchard. They have two children, a grand-dog, and two grand-cats. And a wonderful, tiny grandson, their newborn first.
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Amazon Author Profile: https://www.amazon.com/G-S-Kenney/e/B07RD6ZTXX/