Earth’s Shadow is dying. Not Earth itself — humanity left that planet behind centuries ago — but the world that took its place is now showing the same warning signs that doomed the first home. The clock is running again, and this time humanity knows exactly what’s coming.
That’s the world readers step into with Life in the Stars: Planet Abaca, the first book in a new sci-fi series that follows four specialists as they leave everything they know behind to search the stars for a place to survive.
At the center of the story is Sarah Baker, a 26-year-old biologist and the team’s leader, tasked with a responsibility that would crush most people: find a planet that can sustain human life, or watch everything from Earth slowly disappear. She’s joined by Lauren Ye, the team’s doctor, who packs the ship’s medical bay with the kind of obsessive thoroughness that comes from knowing someone’s life might depend on it. Henry Dean, the engineer who helped design their ship, The Endurance IV, understands its systems better than anyone alive. And Drew Gage, a survivalist with SEAL training and a gift for thriving in places that want to kill him, rounds out the crew.
The Endurance IV itself is a character in its own right — the fourth and most advanced version of a ship whose earlier iteration is treated almost like a relic by the people who depend on its legacy. It’s never been flown. Its full capabilities are barely understood even by the crew flying it. And it’s about to carry four people into a mission with the highest stakes imaginable.
Planet Abaca is a story about preparation under pressure — the final days before launch, the quiet moments between teammates who are about to depend on each other for survival, and the steadily building tension of knowing there’s no guarantee any of this will work. Readers get a close, grounded look at what it actually takes to leave a planet behind: the equipment checks, the supply lists, the relationships being built and tested before the real danger even begins. It’s not a story that opens with explosions. It opens with people doing their jobs, knowing the cost of failure, and doing them anyway.
What makes the book resonate is its honesty about the scale of the problem. There’s no easy fix here, no miracle technology that solves everything. Just twenty-six planets on a list, scarce data, and a team that has to trust the process even when the process is uncertain. It’s science fiction grounded in something deeply human: the instinct to keep going, to keep searching, even when the odds aren’t in your favor.
Planet Abaca is the opening chapter of a much larger story. The Life in the Stars series will follow this crew across all twenty-six planets on their list, each one introducing new dangers, new discoveries, and new reasons to keep pushing forward. This first book lays the emotional and narrative foundation for everything that follows — readers who start here will understand exactly why every planet afterward matters so much.
For fans of grounded, character-driven science fiction — stories that care as much about the people as the technology — Planet Abaca is a strong place to start. It’s available now in both digital and print formats, with a companion comic book adaptation currently in production for readers who want to see this world come to life visually.
The mission has already begun. The only question is whether Sarah, Lauren, Henry, and Drew can find what they’re looking for before time runs out.
Categories: Comics