ANDROMEDA
HOTEL
Picture a
Terran-colonized galaxy... perhaps four, five centuries into the future,
perhaps eight. Wormhole technology has facilitated hyperspeed
travel; human and animal genome splicing has mitigated the rigors of
colonization and exploration, but, save for unpleasant microbes, inedible algaes and tantalizing vestiges of civilizations risen and
fallen millenniums past, ET and his home remain undiscovered. Humanity (pureblood, or “plud”
or variously hybrid with other Terran fauna) is starkly, inexorably, alone.
Too rawthin
bad! Meanwhile there's business to be
done, money on the line, and... as ever, where pure or, even, adulterated
humanity interacts... there are winners and losers.
The winners are the
galaxy's political and economic elites: the transport, mining and vicelords whose wealth buys any depravity... from
disposable child sex-slaves (including "pluds",
at a higher premium) to reconstituted television signals ("chimes",
the older the more valuable) retrieved illegally, and at considerable peril
from the laws of both men and physics, from the perimeter of the great black
hole at the center of the Milky Way.
The losers resemble those
of today - menial workers, busted gamblers, derelicts, old folks with
tapped-out pensions who crawl to Skid Rows like the Baawl,
with its sterile, callous government offices, pawnshops, bars and cheap, shabby
lodgings. Like the Andromeda Hotel.
Broonzy and Turpin are a couple of shiftless, ordinary hybrid starmen on religiously disturbed Captain Munson's cargoship Aegelweiss, detained on
the nondescript planet nicknamed Doobydie or, simply,
"Die" under the triple-suns local wits call Doobydoo. Cheated
out of their wages, they drift... with the flotsam and jetsam of the galaxy...
to the Andromeda, falling in among a rude (if picturesque) rabble, all dreaming
of easy riches (the gambler and mastermind Rateyes,
the corpulent, amphibious manager Gargareeva, old Mallah… who dreams of returning to Terra before death…
various criminals, Old Believers and drinkers of the deadly Bah-roor, even the hotel's nosy, slum Boswell, "Al, from
down the hall."
Surviving, barely (on
their wits and Sailors’ Relief), under the dome on filthy, polluted Die beneath
a constellation of humongous radiant advertising “ilaams”
in low orbit around the planet shining through toxic clouds from the methane
yards, the pair, abetted by Rats, Junkman Tony, the billionaire Arbatax and his tragic wife, Lyca,
a one-legged hooker Quaia and her daughter, Marina,
rehabilitate a junk boneship (a starship composed of
strong, light human tissue), financing their appetite for spare parts with
Rats’ gambling winnings and crimes including gunrunning, Broonzy’s
hiring out as a hitman for an angry bus driver, Marge, and (once the boneship, dubbed the Marina, is navigable), flying upwards
to siphon fuel plasma from a huge hemorrhoid-cream advertising ilaam. Taking on a
corrupt chyme poacher, Dr. Kollucks, they attempt a
daring crime at Bezend, the center of the galaxy;
they come tantalizingly close to the mysteries of the ages, but meet that sort
of fate customarily meted out to most little people trying to rise above their
station.
Book One: “DIE!”
March 24th Chapter Two: REGENCY!
March 27th Chapter Three: YASRICK!
March 31th Chapter Four: INVICTUS!
VISIT ALSO (should
you dare)…