At the peak of cadatas' technological development, their business leaders attempt diverting an asteroid to mine its resources. A miscalculated maneuver misses the mine, and instead strikes their home world. With Cadata in ruins, a spaceship with three hundred explorers begins what would become a 100,000-year journey across the Milky Way, searching for a habitable world to relocate their perishing population. Cadata scientists gene-edit pilots to match the dominant species on each planet. Even with a 5,000-year lifespan, it takes them twenty-three generations to reach Earth. Chief pilots, Wocega and Ortack, and their descendants, face thrilling and terrifying challenges. Their bodies' chemistry covers the spectrum of the periodic table, and their consistency alters from alcohol, to clouds, to metal. They are bombarded by diamond rain. They are enveloped in the sunless darkness of a roaming planet. They are compressed by pressures of extreme gravity, and dense atmospheres. Can even the most adaptable species endure a search for a new planet? This is the first captivating history of cadatas' explorations from one of their expert historians, Ortack-23. Assisted by first ever translations of authoritative first-person archival accounts of cadata explorers, this history traces the geology of Cadata from the formation of this planet, through the events that led to its downfall, with a record of discoveries about alien habitats, and to their present attempts to become legal refugees on Earth. This is a one-of-a-kind theoretical and scientific defense of the presence of aliens on Earth, and of the scientific breakthroughs they achieved to reach us. It is accompanied with a bibliography of sources, an index, a galactic map of the journey, and a chronology of events. As humanity commences on its quest for life elsewhere in the universe, this encyclopedic study explains varieties of atmospheric conditions, and biological organisms as alien to Earth as Earth is to them. "Your work isn't just a novel; it's a lifetime project... I did wonder how damaged the Cadata planet could be, given the shape-shifting and nature-shifting power of the cadatas. Good luck with this world building endeavor." -Larry Niven
Anna Faktorovich (Pseudonym for Ortack-23) is the Director and Founder of the Anaphora Literary Press. She previously taught for over four years at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, Edinboro University of Pennsylvania and the Middle Georgia State College. She has a Ph.D. in English Literature and Criticism, and an MA in Comparative Literature. She published two academic books with McFarland: Rebellion as Genre in the Novels of Scott, Dickens and Stevenson (2013) and The Formulas of Popular Fiction: Elements of Fantasy, Science Fiction, Romance, Religious and Mystery Novels (2014).
