FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
SOLEN: The Eden Archive uses the Hellas Planitia basin — the deepest and oldest geological feature on Mars — as the site of a scientifically plausible first contact, grounded in peer-reviewed research on Martian subsurface chemistry, Earth's hidden ocean, and fungal adaptation in extreme environments.
For: Science · Space · Astrobiology · Technology Editors · Science Communication Writers
LOS ANGELES, CA — May 2026 — The alien life discovery at the center of SOLEN: The Eden Rising is not science fiction in the sense of imagined possibility. It is science fiction in the sense of extrapolated probability — a scenario constructed from real astrobiological research, real Martian geology, and real hypotheses currently active in the scientific literature.
Hellas Planitia is real. It is an impact basin approximately 2,300 kilometres wide and 7,152 metres deep — the largest confirmed impact crater in the solar system. Its depth creates atmospheric pressure at the basin floor significantly higher than the Martian average, making it the location on Mars where liquid water is most plausible under current conditions.
The novel's discovery takes place at 25.0 degrees south, 70.0 degrees east, at an elevation of negative 7,152 metres — real coordinates in a real basin.
The specific discovery in NovaSeed: Eden Rising is a liquid brine pocket at 85 centimetres below the surface of the Hellas basin floor — a perchlorate-rich subsurface water reservoir hosting a four-billion-year-old organism that produces molecules matching no compound in any human database.
Subsurface brine pockets on Mars are not invented. They are a live hypothesis in astrobiology, supported by radar data from ESA's MARSIS instrument and consistent with the known chemistry of Martian regolith.
One of the series' recurring scientific motifs is ringwoodite — a mineral phase of olivine that exists at extreme pressure approximately 700 kilometres below Earth's surface. Research led by Graham Pearson at the University of Alberta confirmed in 2014 that ringwoodite crystals contain structural water. The estimated volume of water locked in Earth's mantle ringwoodite layer is three times the volume of all surface oceans combined.
The series uses this finding as a foundation for its argument about Mars: if Earth's interior contains more water than its surface, the same principle applied to a smaller, geologically cooler planet suggests that Martian subsurface water may have persisted in forms and quantities that surface observation cannot detect.
The organism discovered beneath Hellas Planitia functions like a mycorrhizal network — a distributed chemical signaling system that responds to external pressure, produces gradient-oriented molecular outputs, and appears to possess something that behaves like directional awareness.
The mycorrhizal network model is grounded in real biology. Research on Earth's fungal communication systems has established that distributed biological networks can exhibit complex adaptive behaviours without centralised nervous systems.
The SOLEN Record is a companion science publication maintained alongside the series, containing long-form articles on the real science behind each element of the discovery — grounded in peer-reviewed research and written to be accessible to general readers.
SOLEN: The Eden Archive is an eight-book hard science fiction saga by Warren Pulley, published simultaneously across Amazon KDP and 15+ global ebook retailers in 2026. The series spans one hundred years of Martian colonization history, from the first human landing at Hellas Planitia in 2054 through the centennial of the Martian colony in 2154.
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SOLEN Science Archive · SOLEN Intelligence Archive · NovaSeed: Eden Rising