Passage to Gomorrah

On a future Earth where space travel is glamorous, punishing, and deeply commercialized, Nathaniel Cross is driven by an almost spiritual need to leave home, even as his father dismisses astronauts as misfits and warns him to choose a normal life. He stows away, bargains for a place aboard ship, and becomes a pilot in a system that turns loneliness into business and desire into regulation. Across that same world, Lady Berenice enters the legalized profession of a "lady of the stars," a corporate, heavily controlled form of interstellar sex work shaped by radiation, caste rules, contraceptive mandates, and the threat of exile to Gomorrah if she becomes pregnant. When Cross escorts Berenice toward A Priori, their wary exchange turns intimate as he explains the terrifying nature of a time storm: on that strange world, travelers can be swept into shared relivings of the past, where identity and reality begin to blur. As the storm strikes, Cross is forced through a cascade of childhood humiliations and family tensions, exposing the wounds behind his disciplined exterior, while Berenice discovers that her fate may be entwined with his. In the end, suspicion gives way to the possibility of love, and a hidden valley on Gomorrah reveals the so-called monsters as winged children and families, opening a vision of beauty, truth, and human connection beyond a society built on exploitation. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.