Exile From Venus

Craig Verrill has spent his life beneath Venus's protective domes, breathing clean air, living in an ordered civilization untouched by the chaos that consumed Earth centuries ago. Then an impulse drives him back to his dying homeworld, a promise made in a moment of passion, and the lure of the Fire of Skanderbeg, a legendary ruby said to hold power over life and death itself. But the Earth that awaits him is a nightmare: radioactive wastelands, brutal mutated survivors, and cities in ruins. What begins as a quest for a jewel becomes a journey through the corpse of a civilization, forcing Verrill to question whether humanity's destructive nature was always written in its stars, or if something worse waits among the ruins. This is vintage pulp adventure at its finest: visceral, propulsive, and unapologetically romantic about both lost empires and the wild courage it takes to walk among their remains.