Horseshoe Pass trip inspires sci-fi novel

A cycling trip up the Horseshoe Pass near Llangollen was the inspiration for a new science fiction book by a Chester author.

Geoff Nelder’s latest work, ARIA Left Luggage, tells the story of how astronauts bring back to Earth a case they find floating in space.

Inside it is a virus which when unknowingly unleashed spreads an amnesia virus which goes around the world like wildfire bringing the planet to the edge of disaster.

In the prologue to the book, the author writes: “This novel would not have been possible without a Dawes Super Galaxy allowing me to cycle up the Welsh slope of Horseshoe Pass, North Wales, making my heart thump so fast my brain – freshly oxygenated – buzzed with the original idea in ARIA.”

Originally from the south of England and now living with his wife and children, Nelder taught IT and geography in the local high school.

He has post-grad researched and written about climatic change, run computer clubs and was editor of a computer magazine.

Nelder has published a couple of climate books and has short stories used in a variety of literary
magazines.


His first novel, a humour thriller, Escaping Reality, was published in 2005.

Left Luggage  is part of a sci-fi trilogy entitled which is published by LL-Publications.

The bug at the centre of the book he calls Alien Retrograde Infectious Amnesia.

It causes everyone who catches it to regress, seemingly slowly at first, but it soon becomes apparent that years of lives are being lost memory-wise, and fast.

Enter the hero Ryder, who has been on to the thing from the start and has the brainpower – and contacts – to stay away and eventually find like-minded uninfected people to try to help him to stay alive and to come up with a solution to the huge threat to  humanity.
 

Throughout, Ryder tries his best, first of all persuading uninfected friends and colleagues to barricade themselves in a remote Welsh valley.
 

But then as his leadership is tested time and again even his morals start to slip and the lines between what is right and wrong according to everything he was taught and believes in start to blur.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/ARIA-Left-Luggage-ebook/dp/B008RADGYC#_