The Wannoshay Cycle (cover by Alan M. Grant)
The Story
The Wannoshay Cycle takes place in a world where terrorism has spread to America in the form of repeated bombings and violent attacks. Adding to the chaos and paranoia, three dozen alien ships crash-land in the middle of a blizzard, landing in the Midwest of America and Canada.
Almost miraculously, in spite of the paranoia of the people who encounter them, the aliens known as the Wannoshay begin to integrate slowly into human society. The transition is interrupted, however, when a series of mysterious explosions occur, and the “Wantas” are blamed.
The aliens are placed into internment camps, “for their protection and our own,” according to human leaders. An unlikely group of humans, led by a Catholic priest, converge around the alien Mother Ship in Iowa City, where the Wannoshay are inexplicably dying.
The humans soon discover the “true history” of the aliens, a secret that explains their epidemic sickness and forces the humans to make painful choices about how to help these immigrants to our world, choices that will take them away from the lives they once knew.
The Book
The Wannoshay Cycle was published by Five Star Books in January of 2008. The ISBNs are 978-1-59414-661-9 and 1-59414-661-6.
Buy a copy from Amazon.com, or use the links on my Store page for your preferred store.
The Reviews
The following are just snippets of longer reviews; I’ve linked to the whole review where possible:
The Wannoshay are as vulnerable as the homeless, as pliable as the ne’er-do-wells who haunt fast food restaurants and run-down bars. They’re pragmatic, not romantic. And they’re as easily sidelined, dismissed and converted into scapegoats for all of our ills, for all of our sins.
—Rick Kleffel, The Agony Column (read the entire review)
The examination of what happens when two totally disparate cultures collide poses some thought-provoking questions. Do we have the right as humans to impose our authority on aliens from another world? How would we handle Wannoshay landing in our present time and place?
—Justin, Fantasybookspot (read the entire review)
Jasper has a real gift for evoking a mood, and for the most part, manages to make the Wannoshay seem genuinely, creepily alien and inexplicable.
—Kirkus Reviews (read the entire review)
Jasper imagines what first contact might be beyond Wellsian invasion—not hostile, necessarily, on either side, but rife with conflict due to misunderstandings and the problems faced by both cultures.
—Regina Schroeder, Booklist
Jasper’s first novel (he has previously published short fiction) makes important points about the current treatment of immigrant populations while telling a story of sacrifice and courage that belongs in larger libraries.
—Library Journal
Ordinarily these types of novels, with shorter work incorporated inside a larger work, are called fix-it novels. I tend to think of fix-it novels as discrete short pieces linked by a little transitional text, but here Jasper has deeply reworked the stories to interweave all these stories into one complex, fully integrated novel. The result is an absorbing work full of unflinching looks at what makes us human, how we might react to be faced with the truly incomprehensible.
— Sherwood Smith, SF Site (read the entire review)
The Stories Behind the Novel
The novel is an expansion of some of my stories that have been published already. Here are the published stories that started it all:
- “Redemption, Drawing Near”
- “Explosions“
- “Crossing the Camp“
- “Mud and Salt“
- “Wantaviewer“
And there’s also a “prequel” story, set on the alien home planet, entitled “Drinker.”
The Excerpt — from Chapter One
"Johndo" by Edward Noon
For the second time that week, a group of armed soldiers filled the alcove at the back of Father Joshua McDowell’s church.
As he went through the familiar, almost unconscious movements of the morning Mass, Joshua did his best to ignore them. The soldiers’ shadows drifted in and out of focus between the two tall, wooden confessionals carved with tired crosses and the worn faces of saints. The four soldiers were nearly invisible to his old eyes, thanks to their nano-fiber camouflage fatigues.
Taking a deep breath, he continued with that day’s reading: “But when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation has come. Look up and raise your heads, people, because your redemption is drawing near.”
As if on cue, the lead soldier stepped forward out of the shimmering air in front of the church’s new security arch, her black pulse gun the same color as the hull of the ships that had crashed to Earth barely a month earlier.
She wanted to make sure Joshua saw them there. All of them. He turned his gaze back on his meager congregation, the same dozen elderly men and women he saw daily, all of them lifelong Chicago residents, and hoped the soldiers hadn’t come for him.
"Nonami" by Martin Gruelle
At the end of Mass he watched the slow departure of his few remaining people. Back in January, this Mass would have been packed with parishioners. That had been after the bombings and the ships, but before the riots and the bands of cultists. Now it was March, and winter threatened to linger on for another season.
As soon as he was back in the rectory, Joshua shed his heavy outer robe and musty-smelling vestments. His hands shaking, he arranged his gray hair in an attempt to hide his bald spot, feeling his fifty-eight years mostly inside his chest. His heart attack had been less than three months ago, and the now-familiar ache worsened on cold days.
“They don’t know about the colonel,” he told his reflection. “If they did, they would’ve taken you in right away. Have faith, McDowell.”
Picking up his Bible, he returned to the church. His shoes echoed down the main aisle and kicked up dust lit by the three dozen stained-glass windows reinforced with safety glass. A bittersweet mix of ozone and gun oil filled the air at the back of the church.
“So,” he said to the young woman standing in the alcove, after a glance at her nametag, “Sergeant Murphy. What brings you back here again? It’s not every church that has an armed guard, you know.”
The female soldier looked at him from behind a pair of wide, gray-lensed glasses. Above the three stripes affixed to her helmet was a blue badge decorated with an old-fashioned rifle and a silver wreath. By the time he looked back at her face, her glasses had turned transparent. Light blue eyes now looked out at him, slightly magnified.
"Mud and Salt" by Jayson Doolittle
“We’ve gotten more reports about some recent sightings of … ah, undesirable groups in the area, sir. Anti-military protesters, possible new-religion types, and the like.”
He stifled a bitter smile at the soldier’s description of the cults. Calling what they practiced a new religion was as close to a slap in the face to his work as a person could get without raising a hand.
“With the criminal activity that’s taken place here recently, we were ordered to check in on you, sir. Just trying to prevent a repeat of things like the firebombing from down the street. It’s not every street that’s had such a run of bad luck as yours,” the soldier added.
He winced at the memory of the burning apartment complex, followed by the riots only a few weeks ago that had resulted in the destruction of the church’s organ and the installation of the new security system. The police and the soldiers with their pulse guns had arrived just in time that night, stopping the band of wild-eyed cultists on their way to the altar.
“Sorry,” Sergeant Murphy said a moment later. “That came out wrong, sir.”
Joshua nodded, looking away from her at the white metal of the security arch in front of the outer door. The soldiers had turned it off, silencing its low hum. The female soldier moved closer and put two gloved fingers in front of the tiny mike attached to her cheek.
“World’s been different since January, sir,” she whispered. “Everything’s changed. We gotta stick together, y’know?”
He looked at the female soldier with her black cheek mike and ear buds, her tiny blue forehead sensors, her shifting gray camouflage uniform, her blue-black pulse rifle, and her opaqued glasses.
“Yes,” he said after Sergeant Murphy had removed her hand from her mike. “The world has changed. Too much.”
“We’d best be going, sir. Unless you have anything suspicious to report?”
Shaking his head, he forced a smile her way. He wondered how hard it would have been for Sergeant Murphy to call him “Father.”
“Okay, then, Mister McDowell. Be careful.”
The four of them turned and walked through the security arch without a sound. He stepped through the arch himself and grabbed the outer door.
“Thanks,” he called as a blast of cold air peppered with snow slammed into him. After pulling the door closed, he activated the security arch again, turning the air in front of him to static for a disconcerting moment before it cleared. Even through the thick doors and walls of his hundred-year-old church, he could hear the distant whine of a siren, accompanied by what sounded like the rattle of gunfire.
He closed his eyes and prayed that his meeting this afternoon would somehow begin the process of recovering the peace his church, his street, his city, his country, and the rest of his world had lost.
Contrary to what most cultists and former members of his church thought, it was a peace that had been lost long before the ships ever arrived.
The ships came in the middle of a night-time blizzard not long after the New Year, falling to Earth like more wreckage dropped onto an already battered landscape.
Most people didn’t even notice them at first, having long ago fallen out of the habit of looking up at the sky. Like unwatched trees falling in a forest, the rectangular black vessels of alien metal appeared for a few instants on the geo-satellite systems and aviation radar, creating close to three dozen fingers of flashing trajectories. Then they split apart and crash-landed onto the frozen turf of the American Midwest and southern Canada like scattered pieces of a black puzzle.
But Father Joshua saw and remembered the ships. The day they arrived was still crystal-clear in his memory; it was also the same day he’d been attacked on the street by junkies.
He was walking in the Hyde Park neighborhood after a checkup with his cardiologist, a follow-up after his heart attack the previous autumn. The early-winter snow fell onto his face and quickly coated the sidewalk and street, deadening all sounds. His scuffed black shoes, worn on the bottoms, fought for traction in a losing battle with the snow, and he didn’t hear the footsteps until too late.
When he turned to see who was coming up behind him, he was knocked to the ground and kicked in the side with metal-tipped boots. Strong, unsteady hands pulled off his coat with a rough efficiency. When Joshua tried to roll away, cold snow up his shirt sleeves and down his tight collar, he got a glimpse of two quivering, wide-eyed faces. The breaths of his attackers whistled in and out of their mouths like tiny screams.
Blur. The men were raging from Blur.
Remembering the stories on the various Netstreams about the brutal drug-related assaults of the past few weeks, he didn’t dare fight back, even as his wallet and rosary disappeared into hands that almost moved too fast for his eyes to follow. They took his belongings and dashed off madly down the pockmarked street, outrunning cars as they disappearing into the night.
Joshua staggered back to the hospital, arms wrapped around his own chest as if trying to hold himself together. While he was waiting in the crowded emergency ward, he saw the first newscast on the Netstream about a downed ship in Canada.
“More are on the way,” the newsreader kept repeating, as if the face on the wallscreen was caught in a hacker’s endless loop.
The ward was especially crowded that night, thanks to the most recent car-bomb, already blamed on the suicide cultists. Everyone sitting, standing, or sprawled on the dirty floor paid silent attention to the Netstream, with the exception of the two unconscious Blur junkies lying near the entrance. They twitched and groaned, sleeping off the effects of the drug.
As he watched the Netstream report that additional ships had been sighted in America as well as Canada, something shifted inside of Joshua. He forgot about his stolen wallet, coat, and rosary. A hot, heart-squeezing feeling stirred inside him, an almost-desperate need. He wiped cold sweat from his bald forehead. Three, if not four, decades had passed since he’d felt this way before.
He didn’t know who was aboard those ships, but he knew he could help them, in some way. He had to help them. They needed him.
“More ships are on the way,” the newsreader said again to the silent mass of injured and sick gathered in the emergency ward. Low conversations, spiked now and then with shouts of fear, floated around him in English, Spanish, Russian, Korean, and, from a pair of amber-skinned people behind him, what sounded like Farsi. They couple must have made it out of Iran before America declared war on their country three years ago.
Joshua had remained there all night, surrounded by the injured and sick from down the street and around the world, and they watched the news unfurl from the Netstream like yarn from a ball rolled too tightly.
“World-will-never-be the same,” a thin white girl sitting next to him said in a Blur-sped voice. She held herself tightly, bare arms like pale sticks jutting from her torn plastic vest jacket. She rocked back and forth, coming down off the drug, and her gaze kept flickering from the wallscreen back to Joshua.
Joshua wanted to reach out and console the girl, but her quivering hands and spastic movements—along with the dull ache lingering in his sides and chest—stilled his impulse. She looked so much like all the others, including the Indian boy who’d come up to Joshua outside the homeless shelter just two days earlier.
The boy’s brown eyes were bloodshot, his hands constantly moving. At first Joshua didn’t think he was using anything—he wouldn’t have been able to see the boy’s hands moving at all if the child had been on Blur. He told Joshua he was starting over, getting off using and selling. The boy walked with him all the way back to the church, claiming in his perfect English that he sold only to the rich, dealing with them through their razor-tipped fences at night or passing their armored cars on the street. He went on and on, talking about how Blur hit the user like a mix of cocaine and speed, with a little morphine thrown in to ease the harsh edges.
By the time they’d reached the doors to the Shrine of Our Lady of Pompeii, Joshua had made up his mind. He couldn’t let the boy in. Not after all the boy had said and done, even if he was just a child. Instead, as if to compensate for not doing his chosen duty and offering the boy sanctuary, Joshua spent the next few hours talking on the front steps with the boy, whose shaking grew worse as his speech became slower and more garbled.
Then the boy’s so-called friends came looking for him just before dawn. And Joshua let them take him. He simply walked back into his church, made sure the security arch was powered on behind him, and closed the doors for good.
Up on the wallscreen in the emergency room waiting area, another black, misshapen ship came into focus, embedded into the ground like a rotting tooth. He patted the cold arm of the shivering girl next to him, but her response was only to grunt and flinch away from him.
Joshua watched for the rest of the night into morning, unable to close his eyes as he tried to regain the fading sense of need he’d felt just a few short minutes ago. The feeling was there, but like a good memory or a blissful dream, it remained out of reach.
Continued…
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