Book Description
A gunner and her sometimes lover, sometimes enemy. An aristocrat whose family was taken down politically. A pilot who lives as an exile in the Empire, and who harbors a secret desire to return to Earth. Moving in and out of each other’s lives over the years, all four are fighting a losing battle with The Others. None of them want to admit it. When they each arrive at a crossroads, the stakes are life and death—and a breaking open of everything they thought they wanted and believed.
(see the poem that the story explores)
A Character Video (Jason)
About the Author
Sara Barkat is the author of the National Indie Excellence Awards finalist The Shivering Ground & Other Stories. She is also the illustrator of two graphic novels: The Yellow Wall-Paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and The Colour out of Space by H.P. Lovecraft. Sara adores art, sailing, random coding projects, and quantum physics. You can find her at sarabarkat.com or drawing mostly daily at sadbook.substack.com
Table of Contents for Otherside: a Novel
1 – Old Tomo
2 – The Trash Heap
3 – Cat’s Cradle
4 – The Seekers
5 – Durley Street
6 – The Mission
7 – Blood
8 – Lilia
9 – Dee
10 – Marla
11 – The Body
12 – Frontline
13 – Scummer
14 – The Impossible Tunnel
15 – Saeinth Arth
16 – Our Rituals
17 – Jan
18 – Otherside
19 – The Lighthouse
Timeline
Otherside: a novel: excerpt
Jason had spent the week off-duty in the port-houses, floating tethered by massive cables to the ground of the planet, upon which the elevators would run up into the low-atmosphere. Those places were neither here nor there, and no one looked twice at anything. He spent the week gambling away exactly thirty percent of his monthly credits; he kept the rest locked to send directly to savings. He wasn’t going to end up washed up like old Tomo, who spent the time shuttling between his job sorting the recyclables and the casinos where he spent all his money before he could use any of it. But even old Tomo was good enough to hang out with; if you could get him to leave the hooks for two seconds. Jason had his ways; yanking them off worked. The disorientation of leaving the VR made Tomo mad enough and dizzy enough to be dragged off without a fuss to go eat and take care of himself and perhaps be bribed into a story before he drifted back into the dripmachines.
“Why d’you wanna hear about it?” Tomo said, with a singular frown. His icy blue eyes were still intimidating, his big, calloused hands threaded through with stick-tags and rings.
“I told you,” Jason said, like always. “You’re the only one who ever escaped.”
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