Down to Dirt: 1 (Dirt and Stars) - Softcover

Killiany, Kevin

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798890251954

Publisher: Evolved Publishing, 2025

Synopsis

Dirt is for losers.

"DOWN TO DIRT is YA hard science fiction with an attitude, full of technical details as engaging as the characters. I was immediately drawn into the story." ~ Kevin J. Anderson, New York Times bestselling author of ETERNITY'S MIND

It's 2021, and humanity has been in space for half a century. Giant space stations are hubs of scientific and industrial research, colonies are spreading across the moon and Mars, and sixteen-year-old Mara Duval, born and raised on Tombaugh Station, is training to be part of humanity's first mission to the moons of Jupiter.

Life is full of possibilities-opportunities denied those deemed unfit for life in space. The unintelligent, the diseased, the mentally unstable, and the criminal-all who have been rejected by the Space Service-are condemned to live their lives on dirt, a planet everyone knows but no one mentions. Every spacer has relatives on dirt, family members who failed to qualify for space. Some are remembered, some are forgotten; but all are left behind.

To Mara's horror, her parents have mandated she understand her past before she can pursue her future. If she wants to follow her dream to Jupiter, she must leave the safety of space and get to know her uncle, aunt, and cousin confined to dirt. Given no choice, she submits to medical procedures and intense physical training-bracing herself to survive weeks of exile amid violence, disease, and dangers she can only imagine.

But nothing could prepare Mara for what she discovers when she goes down to dirt.

EVOLVED PUBLISHING PRESENTS the first book in this critically acclaimed, timely, young adult science fiction adventure that's sure to keep you riveted.

About this title

About the Author

I was raised in the heart of Florida in the 1950s and '60s, growing up in a pink cinderblock house in a community hemmed by orange groves against the edge of a swamp and the shore of a lake. I didn't read anything not assigned by a teacher until the summer of 1967, when an injury--the outcome of an idea that looked good at the time--laid me up for several weeks. In an effort to keep me sane my mother brought me armloads of books from the library, which I used to build forts... until the red-and-yellow cover of Have Space Suit, Will Travel lured me into looking inside. To my surprise, I read it--twice--and was hooked. In later years, I read and loved mysteries, fantasies, and historicals, but my reader's heart first imprinted on YA science fiction.

I left Florida for California in 1973, and wandered a bit before settling on North Carolina's coast. Along the way I became a husband, a father (three times), and in 2013 a grandfather. I've had a half-dozen careers in those forty years, working in education or mental health. These days, when I'm not writing I'm teaching English at a community college.

Oh, did I not mention writing? I began in 1967, right after I started reading, and--if you overlook thousands of rejections and thirty-three years of practice--was an immediate success. Since my first sale in 2000 I've sold three novels, a half-dozen novellas, and thirty-one short stories. I've also co-written or co-edited nineteen role-players' resource and rule books.

My writing is fueled by two questions: "What happened?" and "What if?" The first motivates my exploration of lesser-known history, and the second drives my speculations about how our world would be changed if we had chosen differently. From those two streams my stories flow.

Edition details

• Publisher: Evolved Publishing
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 13: 9798890251954
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 350