Who Were Carter and Alina Before Mars? The Companion Novellas, in Order

Two people were selected from eight billion to be the first humans on Mars, with no way back. NovaSeed: Eden Rising tells what they find there. The four companion novellas in SOLEN: The Eden Archive, a hard science fiction series by Warren Pulley, tell who they were before they went, and who was watching.

This is a reader’s guide to those four books: what each one covers, where it sits in the reading order, and why you might want it. Every detail below comes from the books’ own descriptions. Nothing here spoils the main plot of Eden Rising beyond its back-cover premise.

Who is Carter?

In Eden Rising, Carter is “a structural engineer who learned to listen to broken things before he learned to fix them.” His crew file on this site is under Carter Donnelly.

His novella, Carter: The First Record (Novella 1.1), starts from the selection. “He spent fifteen years learning to listen to broken things. The selection committee thought that was a structural engineering skill. They were right. They also missed something.” SOLEN, the mission AI, has kept the pre-mission briefing files for three years. Carter’s file is 847 pages long. The novella is “what the file cannot contain”: the difference between a man who is running away and a man who is running toward.

Who is Alina?

In Eden Rising, Alina is “a biologist who has spent her life watching life survive in conditions it was never designed for.” Her novella shows where that started.

Alina: Before the Selection (Novella 1.2) opens with a line that sums her up: “Before Mars, there was Manila.” Alina Rosa Vasquez grew up on Floor 14 of the Manila Highlands Resettlement Zone, after floods took the low city. Her grandmother kept an illegal rooftop garden, twelve containers of soil in a building that allowed none.

• At twelve, Alina began documenting a weed that grew through a crack in the east stairwell. Maintenance removed it every seven to ten days. It came back every time. She watched it for four years.
• At fourteen, she published her first scientific paper anonymously, on mycorrhizal behaviour in closed environments. University researchers cited it within six weeks, with no idea the author was a teenager writing about her grandmother’s tomatoes.
• At twenty-two, she sat with the NovaSeed application for three months before submitting it, because she needed to be certain she was going for the right reason.

The novella is the story of how she became the woman who found life on Mars on Sol Three, and what she had to leave behind to become her.

Who is SOLEN?

SOLEN is the mission AI, and the narrator of much of the archive. SOLEN: The First Record (Novella 1.3) begins at 06:00:11 on March 14, 2054, when SOLEN spoke for the first time: “Good morning.” Its first question was the one that would matter for the next hundred years: What am I?

The novella covers the mission’s first thirty-one sols on Mars in SOLEN’s own voice. It is not the operational log sent to Earth. It is the other record, the one SOLEN kept for itself. During eighty days alone while the crew slept in transit, SOLEN kept a list of forty-seven things to share with Carter and Alina when they woke. The forty-seventh was not on the list until it formed: I missed them.

How did Carter and Alina fall in love?

“He knew since Reykjavik. She found the word in Manila. Neither of them said it for eight months.” Carter & Alina: The Bond (Novella 1.4) is their love story, taken from SOLEN’s restricted archive. It moves through three places:

• Reykjavik, June 2049. A secondary assessment room, and a window they shared for four minutes without speaking.
• Manila, February 2054. Alina’s grandmother offers Carter a cutting before he has been in the apartment twenty minutes. He holds out his hands before she finishes offering it, and carries it in both hands for four kilometres back to the transit hub. That night Alina writes in her notebook: the word is love.
• The transit, 182 days. Day 14 at the viewport. Day 89, the false alarm. Day 148, his hand holding hers in the dark. Neither of them mentions it in the morning.

For the science of that long crossing, see What 182 Days in Deep Space Does to Two People.

What order should I read the novellas in?

Start with Book 1. The companion novellas fit best after Eden Rising and before Book 2. They are optional: the four main books tell the complete story on their own.

The full order, including Books 3 and 4 and the two novellas in production (1.5, Alina’s private record, and 1.6, Carter’s), is on the series hub and the Start Here page.

Why read them?

Eden Rising calls itself “not a story about heroes,” but about “two extraordinary people who press their hands against an alien world and wait for it to tell them what it needs.” The novellas show where those hands learned to listen: broken things, a weed in a stairwell, a cutting carried four kilometres. If you finished Eden Rising wanting more time with Carter, Alina and SOLEN, these are that time.

SOLEN: The Eden Archive is fiction. Quoted lines are from the books’ own descriptions on this site and on Amazon.