Alyssa Powell

Song From A Shattered Lyre

In the shadow of the last colony’s collapse, Elara Corbin and Dr. Lena Novak planned and executed a bold reimagination of life on Mars. When their mission launched in 2055, they expected their colony — Elysium — to thrive where its predecessor failed. Two years later, Earth lost contact after a devastating accident claimed Elara. For decades, the world believed Elysium died with her — and that Dr. Lena Novak was responsible.

In 2097, Earth sends Kaelen Reyes to discover how a colony cut off from home could not only survive, but find the will to thrive. What she finds is a garden where there should have been a tomb, and a vilified Lena still very much alive. Lena isn’t just recounting history; she is exhuming a bitter crime. But her story isn’t about engineering or survival — it’s about Elara, sabotage, and rebuilding a world after the ruin of the woman she loved.

The sapphic aerospace drama of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Atmosphere with the post-collapse resilience and dual-timeline structure of Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven.

Inheritance of Faults

With an urn of ashes, a blinding migraine, and the hellish South Texas heat as her only company, feral geophysicist Ana Reed drives to the borderlands to fulfill her mother’s final, spiteful request: spend two weeks on the abandoned family property before selling it. But when she arrives in sun-scorched Frontera, she finds a massive corporate oil rig looming on her fenceline. By nightfall, the bedrock itself starts screaming at her.

Across town, Dr. Isabel Navarro is meticulously preparing to die. The impeccably controlled historian has spent years managing the ghosts that haunt the edges of her vision, but the Anima Terra — the ancient, metaphysical vein of magic running beneath Frontera — is fracturing. Someone is drilling into it. And every time the drill bites, Isabel’s nervous system pays the toll in devastating, inexplicable seizures.

When Ana marches into Isabel’s climate-controlled archive looking for answers, they don’t just meet — they collide. It will take a brutal combination of deep-earth geology, 17th-century border history, and a staggering amount of spite to stop the rig from tearing apart the boundary between Texas and Mexico, and life and death.

A love letter to and a critique of the true history of the peoples of northern Mexico and South Texas. In conversation with Isabel Cañas’s The Possession of Alba Díaz and Marcela Fuentes’s Malas.