Skinship

Bearing the final remnants of humanity and its genetic archive, the last Skinship to leave a dying, distant-future Earth closes in on the Dragonhead Nebula and the prospect planet that offers resurrection. With Applewhite, the First Navigator, apparently in the process of psychic collapse, a conspiracy emerges to murder him before he can compromise the mission or destroy the ship. Resisting this conspiracy is Monamy, a nonhuman Archivist who alone understands the nature of Applewhite’s breakdown. Inside the uncanny ship, chilling violence and grotesque forms break out. Meanwhile, 1,500 years after the abandonment of the planet, the last man on Earth struggles to survive and, somehow, escape.

Cinematic and intimate, James Reich’s latest novel evokes a yearning for the future evolving into panic, and the contradictions of nostalgia for forgotten things. Like Silent Running and The Man Who Fell to Earth before it, Skinship penetrates the loneliness of an ecological crisis.