What secrets lie hidden within the ruins of a world reclaimed by nature? In the future, where all is lost to the ravages of time, can human nature stand against the fury of mother nature? Rampant pollution, overpopulation, and reckless industrialization have taken the Earth over the edge of collapse. Humans have wrought their own destruction. Can they be saved? Can humanity be restored?

Time is running out…A small group of robotic ambassadors from the past were sent to uncover the mysteries of the future. But can they navigate this desolate post-human world before their energy expires?

The apocalypse. Doomsday. The end of man. Fire and Brimstone. We fear it. We have anxiety over it. We have nightmares about it. We recycle and use biodegradable products because of it. But there are very few of us who embrace it.

In 2007 I wrote this short story as an experiment. I wanted to see if a story could be told that was engaging, entertaining, and inspiring but also set in a desolate landscape where humans were extinct. At the time I was still learning the craft and the results were less than promising. Twelve years later I decided to take another stab at it and redeveloped the short story into a novella. This time I knew exactly what the story would be: a sci-fi adventure into the putrefaction of mankind’s death. In this version of the future New York has become a cesspool of rotting structures, fungus, and evolving new life. As bleak as it sounds the novella became an action-packed ride along the vein of Jules Vern’s Voyages and I Am Legend. While navigating this world the characters struggle against the odds, natural disasters, themselves, and time itself. It was a test to see how dark I could make the future while still holding onto that all too human feeling (the one that inspired me to never stop writing): hope.

Time is a constant flow of never-ending stories where cosmic elements collide and drift apart. We shelter ourselves from the truth that we will all eventually turn to dust. But the story never ends there. The dust becomes part of the Earth. It grows new life. In the aftermath of devastation lies the seeds of rebirth. When writing this project I imagined what life would be like in the absence of life. What life could prosper from the ashes of humanity’s sins? Could life grow again? Could humanity survive its own annihilation? What would it evolve into? What would the dominant life forms be like? Would they be plantlike? Would they, like humans, be parasitic?

A new breed of fungi proliferates in the cavernous dark, sprouting through a new type of cadaverous terrarium: a human skull.

A building collapses, spilling the contents of a thousand years of biological remains: human corpses.

The ancestor of man slithers through the pipes of the city’s ancient sewer system, seeing without eyes and feeding off micronutrients through its skin.

Lanterns is a journey into the unknown, into the depths of posthuman monuments, to search for a new meaning to life. The novella reflects what I attempt to achieve in all my writings: to find optimism and inspiration in dark places. Moss is a character who is stripped of his identity, his brain encased in a robotic sphere, and his memories replaced by a mysterious directive implanted by the corporation that had him cryogenically frozen. He struggles against the ticking of a battery clock to recover his past and save the future of civilization. Moss was meant to be a metaphor for humanity’s tendencies to give up on our humanistic nature, how we reject our inevitable demise, and how we tend to ignore the light at the end of the tunnel. A man who is lost to the pessimism and cynicism that was instilled in him from a previous generation. But what happens when there’s no one left to tell him to feel shame, to feel guilty, to feel defeated when all hope seems lost?

Lanterns of a Dystopia is a gritty sci-fi tale that delves into the darker aspects of human nature and explores the consequences of arrogance and environmental exploitation.

Synopsis:

Nothing lasts forever.

Deep within the bowels of the Earth lies a genetic revelation that reveals the truth of mankind’s downfall. Gary Moss has become disenfranchised by his time as a New York exec and accepts the proposal of a CEO, a proposal that would allow him to transcend time itself and undergo cryogenic hibernation. There’s nothing left for him in the old world, except to transcend the old world for the new. He realizes his peril when he wakes up to a dystopian future trapped in a mechanical and mental cage. Earth has become a desolate landscape of garbage and fungus.

Moss must race against the clock to restore humanity before his robotic power source runs out. Taking influence from H.G. Well’s Time Machine, Rip Van Winkle, and I Am Legend this dark dystopian tale attempts to ask the question: what would life be like if humans continued to dominate the planet? Lanterns of Dystopia is the dark sci-fi novella about humanity’s downfall and Moss’s survival against a world where humans have become an endangered species.

If you’re interested in leaving a review on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other review sites, please let me know and I can provide a free copy!