This World Is Not Yours

by Kemi Ashing-Giwa

Genres: LGBT & Pride; Alien Contact; Hard Science Fiction; Horror

Synopsis

This World Is Not Yours is fast-paced, queer, horror novella by Kemi Ashing-Giwa, blending Cassandra Khaw's inventive horror with a planetary intelligence reminiscent of Sue Burke's Semiosis. A heady, toxic cocktail of a beautiful but macabre world, and a toxic, queer polycule consumed by jealousy and pushed to unforgiveable betrayals.

After fleeing her controlling and murderous family with her fiancée Vinh, Amara embarks on a colonization project, New Belaforme, along with her childhood friend, Jesse.

The planet, beautiful and lethal, produces the Gray, a “self-cleaning” mechanism that New Belaforme’s scientists are certain only attacks invasive organisms, consuming them. Humans have been careful to do nothing to call attention to themselves until a rival colony wakes the Gray.

As Amara, Vinh, and Jesse work to carve out a new life together, each is haunted by past betrayals that surface, expounded by the need to survive the rival colony and the planet itself.

There’s more than one way to be eaten alive.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Release date: September 10, 2024

Publisher: Tor Publishing Group

Print pages: 112

Sample

036

In the far reaches of space, a verdant planet becomes a world. The world observes the life It has made and, perceiving the life to be very good, is pleased.

But a critical piece is missing. Life is so very precious, so very fragile. How best to protect it? Walls can be scaled and poisons can be purged. All it takes are the right tools. No, the world needs something else.

Something… more.

The world takes care of Its own.

 

Before

She has two hours.

That’s how long the grunts gave her. After that, anything’s fair game. They didn’t say those words explicitly, but she’s been in the security industry for a while now. She completed the same “information extraction” tutorials as the local station officers. She knows what the thin smiles and blank eyes meant.

She’s not proud of every scattered fragment of her past, of the things she had to do on the only jobs she could score. But these are the hardest orders she’s ever had to follow.

It takes about two minutes to pack. She’s always refused to call the duffel she stowed under the marble tiling in the foyer a go bag, but that’s what it is. She told herself, over and over, that the extra changes of clothes, the ration packs, the flashlights and guns and solar chargers were for them. But the shirts are two sizes too large for her girlfriend, and there’s only enough food to last one woman for long. Amara doesn’t know the first thing about gun safety, anyway. ...