The Forgotten Planet

A ship crashes on a world humanity abandoned centuries ago. The crew expects wilderness. They find a nightmare. The planet has been forgotten, left to fester in isolation, and what grew in that neglect is terrifying: a suffocating jungle of toxic red dust, forests of killer plants, and insects the size of automobiles. Burl, descendant of a shipwrecked crew, leads a primitive existence stripped of all knowledge his ancestors once had. He has never seen a tool, never heard of fire, never known anything beyond constant survival. But when the new crash survivors arrive, Burl begins to think beyond mere existence. He starts to remember. Or perhaps, for the first time, to truly think. Leinster builds genuine dread through his grotesque ecology, but at its heart this is a story about what we lose when we stop paying attention, and what we might rebuild when we're forced to start again. It is science fiction's unflinching look at degeneration, at humanity's fragility, at the horror of being erased from memory.