Alien first contact tangles up with portal fantasy in this lush, adventurous tale, perfect for anyone who grew up dreaming of visiting Narnia or traveling to the stars.
Lady Ada Quintrall, heir to her grandfather the Duke of Corbridge, wants nothing more than to see her family’s new planet successfully terraformed, restoring their fortune and ensuring them a stable future. That means shutting away her whimsical side (including the beloved Chronicles of Yeneh, a children’s portal fantasy written by her own ancestor)—and refusing the requests of Dr. Zamora, the xenobiologist who is begging to study the planet’s native life before it’s driven extinct.
Ada’s own encounters with the native life are vicious and unsettling. But when Zamora trespasses into an Infested Zone, Ada goes after him and discovers the astonishing truth: Not only does this planet have native sentient life, but those beings share a connection to her family that’s older, deeper, and closer to her heart than she could have imagined.
1. Blending genres is my happy place
Genres are like ice cream. Sometimes you just want one great flavor with no distractions: your classic chocolate (sci-fi), or strawberry (fantasy). Sometimes you want a twist on the classic—I’m partial to strawberry cheesecake ice cream (let’s call that portal fantasy)—or some sub-genre toppings to add excitement. But what about when the ice cream shop offers you multiple scoops of different flavors?
Picking flavors that go together, sometimes unexpectedly, is its own sort of fun. Genre-blending, if done well, is like the most surprisingly delicious ice cream sundae.
I love the bold excitement of a space adventure, and the thought-provoking politics of a good first contact story. I also love the whimsy and nostalgia of a portal fantasy! So in writing The Final Chronicle of Yeneh, I said… why not both?
This story came out of the parallels I saw between space exploration and portal fantasies. Both involve exploring wondrous new worlds, but with different sensibilities; where most portal fantasies let us daydream about saving the world, the best first contact sci-fi confronts us with how we affect the places and species we encounter, often not in a good way. Blending these genres let me play with both that sense of wonder and the weight of planetary-scale consequences.
Add in some light historical vibes (Ada is the space-faring granddaughter of a duke) and a dose of plantpunk, and I discovered an unexpectedly fun flavor combination, which made it a delight to write!
2. Not every character wants a romance—but friendship stories are underrated
At a recent convention, I was telling a reader about Yeneh, specifically about the scientist, Zamora, who pushes Ada to let him study the planet’s native life. “And then they fall in love,” this reader said. I smiled and told her she’d have to read to find out, but she was quite certain of it.
I can’t blame her, not only because romantasy is so popular, but because I did set out for them to have a romance. But in the course of writing, every time I tried to include romantic moments or lingering glances, it fell flat. I’ve written romance subplots before, but Ada was persistently focused on more important things: first on supporting her family’s terraforming project, and then on protecting the yeheneh. Zamora kept snarking at her, but never quite flirting.
Eventually, I recognized that the romance wouldn’t be true to Ada’s character. What she needed was a friend, and Zamora turned out to be the right one. I think there’s a dearth of friendship stories, especially male-female friendship, especially where neither of them are gay. And with apologies to that one reader, in this story, friendship serves far better than a romance would have.
3. Plants on Earth are as wonderfully weird as aliens
When I want to write a truly alien-feeling alien, I turn to research about species on Earth, which can be so much stranger than what we think about day to day. In The Final Chronicle of Yeneh, I knew I wanted the native species to look and feel like plants, yet intelligent and lovable. How would they move and communicate? How would they experience the world?
Scientists are constantly discovering new things about plants that upend our old ideas. Just a few that I took inspiration from:
- The boquila plant in South America changes its appearance to mimic whatever plants are growing near it, meaning it can look completely different from one location to the next, despite being the same species. It’s well documented, but no one knows how it does this.
- In forests, trees cooperate via vast networks of underground fungi, which help spread messages and warnings and even distribute resources between them.
- Not only do plants produce chemicals tailored to ward off specific pests; some have been found to spread warnings to others of their species when they encounter a pest, so the others can get a head start on chemical production. Even more wild: some plants seem to make chemicals that attract the predators of the insects that want to munch on them!
Ideas like these melded together into the aliens that became the yeheneh, the native beings that turn out to be far more than they first appear.
4. Rewilding has its problems—but it still matters
Rewilding was one of the original sparks of inspiration for Yeneh, and as I learned, it’s more complex and less ideal than it might seem. More common in the UK and Europe than here in the US (where we still have some larger areas of minimally-disturbed wilderness—did you know that England, too, was once covered in forests? Can you picture it?), rewilding is the careful, deliberate process of restoring ecologically wrecked landscapes to active ecosystems resembling what they once were before humans intervened. As a nature lover with a background in environmental advocacy, of course it appealed to me!
Rewilding involves bringing back plants that control drainage and erosion, attract pollinators, feed birds, and provide shelter for other insects and critters. You need insects for the birds to eat, predators to control the smaller animals, keystone species like beavers and wolves… An ecosystem is an endlessly complex web of relationships that we humans still don’t fully understand, no matter how much we study it. The best we can do is help foster the basic necessities for the system to right itself.
(The same would be true for terraforming, which is Ada’s family’s goal in Yeneh. Starting with—or making—a blank slate might seem easier, but an artificially created ecosystem could only be a gross simplification, with a tiny fraction of the species you’d find in any ecosystem on Earth.)
The name “rewilding” implies going back to what was there previously, and as I learned, that’s not actually possible. The exact balance, the full range of species and relationships, can never be entirely reproduced. It’s gone forever. But I also learned that that’s okay. Nature changes over time on its own; if rewilding yields a new balance of biodiversity, it’s still better than barren landscapes. The important thing is finding ways to act in harmony with nature, not wiping away the parts we don’t like.
5. Cynicism doesn’t have to kill our childhood dreams
I started writing The Final Chronicle of Yeneh during the pandemic—not a time that inspired optimism about humanity, to say the least. Perhaps the recent memory of lockdown was part of why weaving some portal fantasy into the heart of this sci-fi story was so appealing to me. Portal fantasy is nostalgia and escape from the everyday. No matter how old I get, I still find delight in the idea of experiencing fantastical new places.
Some adult portal fantasies keep that sense of wonder, while others show them dark and tarnished, made gritty by real-world concerns. There are some heavy themes in Yeneh—colonization, genocide, ancestral guilt—but it was important to me that there also be light, hope, and joy. Ada feels a deep connection to the portal fantasies she read as a child (especially the in-world series The Chronicles of Yeneh, written by her own ancestor), and still daydreams about having her own portal fantasy adventure. I wanted to give her a real adventure when she meets the native beings, the yeheneh—and you, dear reader, get to come along with her.
Jo Miles writes optimistic science fiction and fantasy, including the Infinite Pantry series. Their short stories have appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lightspeed, Uncanny, and more. Jo lives in Maryland, where they help nonprofits use the internet to save the world, but mostly serve the whims of their two cats.
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