Alien Exit

By Geoff Nelder

Note: Alien Exit was first released as Exit, Pursued by a Bee

Teaser:

Alien Exit is driven by an Arizona-bred heroine-astronaut, involves a Palaeolithic mongrel called Kur, Glastonbury Festival chaos, steamy sex in space, a loose-cannon journalist and an out-of-control general. They are all involved in the attempt to overcome time-quake calamities created when alien artefacts depart from Earth, oblivious to the chaos they leave behind. This book smashes our assumptions about time in astonishing ways.

Alien Exit smashes the accepted wisdom that time passes smoothly. Perhaps Earth time is kept continuous by something that absorbs time decoherences - not for much longer. The Earth orbits the sun at 18 miles per second. If the mountain in front of you is thrown back a second, it slips 18 miles. Imagine such time-quakes happening all over the world.

As time-quakes cause chaos, a Mars mission is diverted to chase the departing time absorbing spheres. Arguing against hawkish military generals on Earth, the man and woman crew discover a means to communicate with the spheres, but will they listen and return to Earth?

Geoff Nelder, having been a teacher, is now a UK-based freelance editor, writer, and judge of fiction competitions.

Traveller's Notes:

I wrote Alien Exit in 2006 but the ideas arrived decades earlier. When as a kid I walked up Glastonbury hill, I would imagine the tower on the summit to be a spaceship taking off. The hill is compact, a large tor form. It wasn't difficult for my whacky brain to imagine a giant sphere being hidden inside and that one day it would emerge, lifting up that tower as it rose, slowly, into the sky. A real place spurring imagination. Once that scene was in place, I saw other iconic and near-spiritual landmarks in the same way. Uluru (Ayer's Rock in the hot desert of Australia) is an example of a natural formation of spiritual meaning to the Maori but in mind there resided a sphere within. El Capitan, in the Yosemite National Park, California is yet another. I used to be a geography teacher, hence all the places in this book are real. You could follow it with an atlas, but hopefully you won't find your favourite hills rising up in the air beneath you.

Acknowledgments:

My wife and children are not in this book but their patience and ideas helped to form it. By 2006 I was a member of many writers groups such as BeWrite, Ideas4Writers, and The Write Idea.

Deron Douglas at the former Double Dragon Publishing who took a chance on me and exit and asked J Jacobs to edit it. "Geoff, I have been doing this sort of work (writing, editing, proofreading and copywriting) for fifty-two years plus a couple of months and I have seldom encountered cleaner manuscripts than yours."

Encouragement I've had in spades from writers such as Jon Courtney Grimwood, Mark Iles, Gladys Hobson, Magdalena Ball (who interviewed me on blogradio here https://www.blogtalkradio.com/compulsivereader/2008/12/08/Interview-with-Geoff-Nelder ), Ian Clarke and Marilyn Peake.

Strange here but I have to thank a criminal too. Christopher Hill was a sham agent of Hill & Hill Literary Agency, Edinburgh. He persuaded hundreds of writers to accept him as their agent. He took a token fee but then pretended to submit our books to genuine publishing houses. He was outed but before he went into hiding, he'd advised me to have more than my Left Luggage novel under my belt when submitting to publishers. So I wrote Alien Exit on a crim's advice!