About Casindra Lost: Paradisi Chronicles (Lost Mission Series Book 1) by Marti Ward:
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…
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Author Bio:
Marti Ward is an award-winning writer, teacher, researcher and entrepreneur known for his serial startups and his interdisciplinary work from the behavioural, cognitive, health and information sciences to environmental and robotic engineering – but he writes under several variants of his name.Marti hasn’t been into space yet, but has travelled extensively on this planet – living in half a dozen countries and speaking and reading a variety of languages with varying degrees of fluency. He hasn’t yet built an AI as sophisticated as Al – but is working on it, and has around 300 publications relating to AI, Cognitive Science, Computational Linguistics and Robotics.Marti was brought up reading a wide range of books, fiction and non-fiction – exploring Encyclopaedia Britannica at the age of four when his parents wouldn’t answer his persistent “How?” and “Why?” questions.
Marti’s first fantasy story, “Ghostie” was published in print and audio form when he was seven years old – being used in teacher training. But Marti particularly enjoyed the Robot stories of Isaac Asimov. Intelligent AIs from his childhood, Astroboy and HAL, featured in his PhD thesis – and these stories and characters might just get mentioned in his Paradisi writing too. But he really fell in love with Anne McCaffrey’s PERN stories – so don’t be surprised to see influences from that source either.What’s critical about the stories of Clark, Asimov and McCaffrey, about Real Hard SF, is that they seek to explore the scientific and socialogical implications of new interesting or plausible elements and the measures that are put in place to control them.Marti is tickled when people see these influences…
A recent interview is available here:
https://manybooks.net/featured-authors/marti-ward-drama-action-and-near-future-technologies