2021-03-19 08:28
Modified:
description
<p>We're All Gonna Die is a 120,000 word science fiction novel, a modern allusion to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness that drops a Trek-like utopian spaceship crew into Eldritch horror.</p> <p>October Moon Jankowsky-Smith – Moon to her friends – is the counsellor on the United Earth Ship Destiny. Twenty years ago, the UES Hope landed on Eris, the dwarf planet at the edge of the solar system. The captain of the Hope transmitted one final message before going dark: "There is life on Eris. Intelligent life. Send everyone, and spare nothing. Eris changes everything." As the Destiny reaches the fringes of space, it's up to Moon to keep the heads of the crew screwed on – first figuratively, then literally – as they uncover the terrors that consumed the previous mission. She is aided by the story's narrator, the artificial intelligence unit embedded in her head at a young age to mitigate the challenges of Down Syndrome.</p> <p>Upon arriving at Eris's moon, Dysnomia, Moon witnesses her captain and several crew members succumb to an infectious alien fungus. Despite quarantine efforts, the contagion spreads through the Destiny. Meanwhile, the backup officers thawed out to replace the fallen ranks have an agenda of their own, and "accidents" claim the lives of the remaining crew one by one. Moon enlists the help of her friend Seamus, the IT operator, to investigate, but the situation is already out of control by the time they reach Eris. With the cultish replacement crew running the show, they must venture under the surface, where multidimensional aliens battle with self-constructed robots operating with frayed intelligences and dead set on protecting the captain of the Hope, having kept him alive – and prisoner – for two decades.</p> <p>Moon finds Captain Short deep within the ruins of an ancient cyclopean city, of whose original inhabitants there remains only one. As her friends succumb to madness and perish, and she alone is left to combat the millennia-aged monster that deems humans no more significant than livestock, can she stop it from raining its apocalyptic vision down on Earth?</p>
rss-feeder