Two of Us, Untethered

A novel

Two complementary, subtly interconnected stories: one unfolds on a desert planet, and the other is set on a hi-tech space station. One narrator is a nameless, genderless, damaged amnesiac, and the other is a grieving, paranoid scientist who has lost her life’s work. One world is a chaotic mishmash of customs and cultures, and the other is a perfect humanitarian society.

As the narrators (re)discover their environments and find companionship, the picture shifts: the chaotic becomes reasonable, and the perfect turns out to be autocratic. Some tough decisions further blur the lines: the reasonable could simply be ignorant, and the autocratic might actually be caring. Or neither. Or both.

The connection between these two stories isn’t a guarded secret, but unravelling the details of what happened before the story began is a puzzle in itself.