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The Grand Plan
By Garth Hallberg

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Garth Hallberg has had a varied career as a naval officer, an advertising and marketing executive, a non-fiction author (All Consumers Are Not Created Equal, John Wiley & Sons, 1995), a globe-trotting consultant and lecturer, and a college professor (St. John’s Univ., New York).

 

He lives with his family in a small hamlet forty miles from New York, where they enjoy both the stimulation of the big city and the pleasures of the surrounding countryside. His approach to fiction is simple - “Write what you don’t know you know” - because writing a novel is not only a willful act of imagination but also a journey of discovery.

An epic reimagining of the creation story of civilized humankind, based on the ancient Sumerian legends and poems that predate the Bible by the thousands of years and provide the earliest account of a universal flood...

Earth is in crisis, beset by runaway global warming and social turmoil. Astrogeologist Nick Adamstock and doctor and geneticist Helena Minnahan and the crew of the Abzu are on their way to a barren planet at the edge of the solar system to mine the gold desperately needed for artificial photosynthesis.

The Abzu's revolutionary propulsion system temporarily folds the fabric of spacetime in on itself, like a taco shell or a sandwich made with a single slice of bread, thus dramatically shortening their journey. But when the fold fails, Nick and Helena are shocked to find themselves marooned on an eerily familiar planet light-years distant, teeming with the first life ever discovered beyond Earth, based on virtually identical DNA.

The two scientists soon stumble upon 'the People', a clan of primitive hunter-gatherers who appear intelligent but seem to lack the mental spark - curiosity, imagination, inventiveness - that makes intelligence truly useful. The exception is Ava, an attractive and exceptionally gifted member of the clan.

 

Discovering life was astonishing enough, but discovering 'life like us' stretches the bounds of credibility and chance. Was the failure of the space-time fold no accident, but fate? Is their mission to improve the clan's way of life? Or is it even greater, a grand cosmic improvement plan to enhance the People's genes - Helena in the laboratory and Nick as Ava's 'mate' - thus speeding up the development of civilization on 'New Earth'?

Additional Information:

Independently published 2025 - E-book - Rights: World

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