"there's a difference between being a loner and being alone"
A 3.5 year mission from which they'll never return, a 2.5 million lightyear journey to another galaxy, a 1.5 member crew comprising a solitary captain and a half-baked AI...
Captain Sideris is a loner and knows LETO ships like nobody else, having risen to command the Lunar-Earth construction fleet, as they build ships to mine asteroids and colonize Mars. Suddenly he finds the colonization effort is for another planet, in another galaxy, and he's the sole human guinea pig being gated through a wormhole with an AI playing Noah to LETO SS Casindra's ark.
Everything goes well as he starts to survey four planets they plan to exploit, as he gets to know emergent AI 'Al', as he discovers he's building a special relationship with empathic cat 'Simba'. Problem is message drones gated home are not being returned per protocol, with little explanation, no supplies, and some cryptic and disturbing messages.
This full length novel reminiscent of Clarke and Asimov is set in the multi-author multi-genre Paradisi universe. Casindra Lost opens the Lost Mission Series which explains what happened to some of the early missions that underlie the various Paradisi colonization and post-colonization stories. Welcome to the Paradisi Chronicles...
It's not Alice down the rabbithole, but Sideris down the wormhole. And that's just the start of the story.
It's not the old man and the sea, more like the old man and the galaxy. The enemy is not a whale, but a whale of an asteroid... And that's the start of another story.
Word to the Wise: This is the Lost Mission Series. So it's not really a cliffhanger ending when the missions end up, you know, lost!
For those that are familiar with the Paradisi Chronicles universe already, this series fills in backstory to the earlier books.
Casindra Lost and Moraturi Lost take us on two different ships as they commence their mission, and each is the start of a separate arc, arcs that take several books to resolve. But the stories are not independent, and intertwine in a multitude of ways - still you can read either arc independently, starting either one and picking up the other later.
Casindra Lost won the Gold Medal in Science Fiction in the 2021 Global Book Awards for Self-Publishing, and Moraturi Lost won Silver in Science Fiction/Adventure. Moraturi Ring won Silver for Science Fiction Series in the 2021 Global Book Awards.
"If you enjoyed The Martian, and were looking for something better than Ad Astra, Casindra Lost is for you!" - Guy Wheatley, Amazon Reviewer
"This was like a glimps into the future, we will someday be taking similar missions. I would call this a must read for sci-fi fans." - K. N., Amazon Reviewer
