Moraturi Ring

Paradisi Chronicles

By: Marti Ward

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Some cats get tangled up in a ball of wool. The Moraturi cats got entangled in a wormhole.

What a 21st!

Eva's big birthday 'present' was a tired old spaceship lost in space and time, a motley crew of amnesiac patients, 500 colonists in cryo, and a mission that would take a lifetime - assuming she could keep everyone alive till they made planetfall.

SS Moraturi is a Lunar Earth Transfer Orbiter - a kind of spider robot designed to construct space stations and ships in and around the Earth-Moon Lagrange points 1 and 2. Now Moraturi is taking two cryoholds full of colonists to New Eden, an earth-like planet in the Paradisi system, 2.5 million light years from Earth in the Andromeda galaxy.

Eva's problem is that the trip that was to take a month or so is now going to take decades — their emergency supplies were based on 40 days of travel for just 16 crew members with the 500 passengers in cryo — and the cryotechnology can't keep them alive for even a decade at a stretch. Now the success of the mission will be in the hands of a bunch of teenagers — and a couple of cats.

Word to the Wise: This is the Lost Mission Series. So it's not really a cliffhanger ending when the missions end up, you know, lost! For those that are familiar with the Paradisi Chronicles universe already, this series fills in backstory to the earlier books.

Casindra Lost and Moraturi Lost take us on two different ships as they commence their mission, and each is the start of a separate arc, arcs that take several books to resolve. Each volume is designed to be readable on its own, and provide all you need of the backstory without unnecessary spoilers. But the stories and arcs are not independent, and intertwine in a multitude of ways - still you can read either arc independently, starting either one and picking up the other later.

Casindra Lost won the Gold Medal in Science Fiction in the 2021 Global Book Awards for Self-Publishing, while Moraturi Lost won Silver in Science Fiction/Adventure, and together with Moraturi Ring won Silver for Science Fiction Series in the 2021 Global Book Awards.