Dark Beauty

De: Peter Cawdron

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

Dark Beauty is a tribute to Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five. It has been written in his style, with anecdotes from his life, and like his classic work, it incorporates actual events into a fictional setting.

Billy Crusader and Dakota Monroe have been kidnapped by aliens and are housed in the Arctrixmatrian extraterrestrial zoological gardens in a distant galaxy. The director of the zoo is concerned about their welfare and seeks to communicate with them through a series of visions, but these are actual historical events that unfold on Earth. The Arcs see in four dimensions. Compressing their reasoning down to a linear set of words, such as a sentence, requires considerable effort. Billy and Dakota may be held captive on the other side of the universe, but they find themselves contemplating the pivotal points of human history from the perspective of the Arcs.

Dark Beauty was originally published as Suffer the Children in the Kindle Worlds program. When the program ended in 2018, specific references to Vonnegut's work within the story were removed/replaced, while the style and tone were retained. The novella was republished in the Hello World anthology. This version is the 10th anniversary edition, which has been rewritten and expanded.

FIRST CONTACT is a series of stand-alone novels that explore humanity's first interaction with extraterrestrial life. This series is similar to BLACK MIRROR or THE TWILIGHT ZONE in that the series is based on a common theme rather than common characters. This allows these books to be read in any order. Technically, they're all first as they all deal with how we might initially respond to contact with aliens, exploring the social, political, religious, and scientific aspects of First Contact.