Dark Eden

Chris Beckett

From Shelf: Miss Ada Doom's Mad, Bad and Otherwise Seminal SF (and SF-Adjacent, don't @ me) Bookshelf

A marooned outpost of humanity struggles to survive on a startlingly alien world: science fiction as it ought to be from the winner of the Arthur C. Clarke award, 2013

You live in Eden. You are a member of the Family, one of 532 descendants of Angela and Tommy. You shelter beneath the Forest's lantern trees. Beyond the forest lie mountains so forbidding that no one has ever crossed them. The Oldest recount legends of a time when men and women made boats that could travel between worlds. One day, they will come back for you. You live in Eden. You are a member of the Family, one of 532 descendants of two marooned explorers. You huddle, slowly starving, in the warmth of geothermal trees, confined to one barely habitable valley of an alien, sunless world.You are John Redlantern. You will break the laws of Eden, shatter the Family and change history. You will be the first to kill another, the first to venture into the Dark and the first to discover the truth about Eden.