A World Called Solitude

Birk Aaland is a refugee from Earth’s tyrannical government. He finds himself stranded on an undiscovered planet, which seems to be inhabited. Further exploration reveals the fantastic cities of the planet to be long deserted, yet still fully functional. Birk finds the cities to be perfectly maintained by the robot servants of the former inhabitants, and so he becomes the marooned king of an isolated kingdom of machines.

His life away from earth is a lonely one and he spends eleven years without any human contact or companionship, tortured by memories of his former life on Earth and increasingly unable to imagine returning to it. Then Birk’s fitful peace is shattered when a spaceship crashes on his planet, and the sole survivor is a woman named Michi Nakamura, who is not about to accept a fate in Birk’s solitary world.