Product Description

"There’s a problem with Iota Horologii. We lost contact three days ago."

Russell Lutz’s first novel, Iota Cycle, chronicles the creation and development of a human colony fifty-six light years from Earth. At the beginning of the Twenty-Third Century, the colonization ship Hermione, under the watchful care of two androids, brings one hundred thousand settlers to the planets and moons of the Iota Horologii system.

The colony takes its initial, hesitant steps as amateur flier Eliot Burke pilots the first landing in this new system and claims the landing site for his family’s new farm. Slowly, citizens like Burke turn the barren ground of their new home into the breadbasket of the system.

Decades later we join a soldier and a scientist on safari through jungles stranger and more dangerous than any on Earth. In Iota’s halls of power, we witness the political machinations of a government tearing itself apart. We meet a brilliant young scientist whose passionate vision of the future is clouded by love. Through it all, we follow the fates of the Burke family as they, like so many on their home planet, struggle to make their farm a success. Finally, we ride with a platoon of Rangers on a bold mission to find clues to the mystery: Why did Iota Horologii break contact with Earth? The answer leaves the Iota System itself changed forever.

Mark Brand, author of Red Ivy Afternoon, calls it "reminiscent of the best parts of Dune, Jurassic Park, and a number of Ray Bradbury’s works." Across two centuries and including stories both personal and epic, Iota Cycle shows the dangers and the promise of the future.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #781294 in Books
• Published on: 2006-06-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 212 pages

About the Author
Russell Lutz makes his novel publishing debut with Iota Cycle. Holding two degrees in mathematics and after a decade of experience in retail supply chain management, he is uniquely qualified to write speculative fiction. His short stories have previously appeared in several webzines and magazines, including Byzarium, The SiNK, scifantastic, and anotherealm. He won the 2005 SFFWorld First Place prize for short fiction for the Iota Cycle story "Fall". His story "Athens 3004" appeared in the short fiction anthology Silverthought: Ignition. His current projects include a follow up to Iota Cycle. He lives, works, reads, writes, watches movies and ponders the imponderable in Seattle.

Customer Reviews

Explosive and vision of other worlds
Now that I've had the opportunity to read the full version of Iota Cycle, I can report with confidence that the snippets of the book available as preview chapters on Silverthought.com represent only a small fraction of this expansive and spectacular story. I will not ruin the story by going into plot specifics, but it suffices to say Iota Cycle is one hell of a wild ride.

Particularly wonderful is the heady sense that we've lost our bearings in this astronomical "New World." Things like "years" and "people" and "farms" and "animals" no longer have any static meaning. Similarly, the conceptual basis things like age, hope, hardship, and technology are challenged and redefined. The inhabitants of "Europe" are ready to be married at age fifteen, taking into account that the years are four hundred and some-odd days long rather than the Earth 365. Small touches like this throughout the book make for a sense of seat-of-the-pants flying that is infinitely welcome in a book otherwise thickly laden with hard "Earth Science" technicalities. The combination is not only interesting, but very, VERY hard to put down. Ergo, I read nearly the entire book in a single sitting.

At its heart, refreshingly, is a story loosely based around the Burke family and several inter-related generations of space colonists. In no small part does the wow factor of this book come from the truly amazing/terrifying conditions that Lutz weaves on planets so strikingly disparate from our own.

Death, while almost omnipresent in the book, plays an interesting character role. After all, not every death is unusual or mysterious. Sometimes people just meet the supreme misfortune of dying in car accidents or of disease or old age. Lutz brings us this again and again in Iota Cycle not to emphasize the death itself but to illustrate the overlooked normalcy of it on a longer time scale than we are used to. This reminded me faintly (and happily) of similar tone in books by Mario Puzo and Harold Robbins.

Stunning, STUNNING visual set pieces abound in Iota Cycle. Rivers of molten metal, jungle planets where every surface is a living creature, and base-jumping with no parachute into a 2000 kilometer-deep abyss, to name just a few. This book will challenge your imagination to wrap itself around the fantastical worlds that Lutz has woven. In many ways, this book is reserved and retrospective. This is masterfully punctuated with passages of these eye-popping "wow" moments that satisfy even the most hard-core scientific mind.

Iota Cycle represents a significant leap ahead in the overall quality of Silverthought Press's print work.

From a NonSci-fi fan
I've never been a sci-fi fan, and wasn't sure what to expect from the book.

This is an amazing story, it just happens to be in the Sci-Fi genre. It reads very easily, the dialogue is natural and the humor in the book happens at just the right moments.

Adding to a really good story are the very real and 3-dimentional characters.

This is an intelligent book and I highly recommended for both non Sci-Fi fans and devotees of the genre!

Surprisingly Satisfying
First, a disclaimer: I was thoroughly prepared to be lukewarm about this book. Why? Because Russell is a colleague; I bought and read the book simply because I wanted to support him. My expectations were low.

Damn, was I ever surprised.

Stories are like women. Some grab you by the throat, shake your head until your brain rattles, and toss you to the ground exhausted but exhilarated. Some tease you just enough to keep paying attention, but never deliver what they promise. And some, like Iota Cycle, are quiet and unassuming as they work their way into the depths of your head and then, just when you think you have her figured out - WHAM! - deliver a Supernova-sized payoff.

Thank God for surpising women and surprising stories.

Iota Cycle doesn't shrink from the hard work of thinking through the implications of its basic premise: what happens when a group of earth dwellers travel to a new solar system and attempt to colonize its "livable" planets and moons? How does ordinary, day-to-day life change on planets with different length orbits and rotations? How do "anamolous" gravitational interactions between heavenly bodies affect the ecosystems and colonists of such planets and moons? What changes for us in such circumstances, but more importantly, what about being human remains unaffected?

That Lutz is able to address such basic questions in a way that engages the left-side of my right-handed head is admirable. That his storytelling is so precise and understated I don't even notice how involved I am in the story until I hit its shocking conclusion is downright amazing.

You want to know if Iota Cycle is worth your precious time and hard-earned money? You betcher sweet bippy it is. If you don't agree, I guarantee to return all the money you paid to read this review.