Imagine being able to close your eyes and suddenly see a world that vanished millions of years ago. You can smell the air, feel the ground beneath another creature’s feet, sense danger approaching and communicate with a being who is part of your own evolutionary history.
That extraordinary idea lies at the heart of L. Richard Feldenberg’s forthcoming novel THEIA.
The story follows Theia Soul, a singer, songwriter and actress who has always known that she experiences the world differently. Since childhood, she has been able to communicate mentally with beings she calls her companions. These companions do not live in another country or even another century. They exist in distant periods of Earth’s past.
One of the most important is Pretty Flower, a prehistoric woman with whom Theia has shared a connection since childhood. Their relationship feels less like an impossible scientific phenomenon and more like a friendship between sisters separated by time. Theia can see Pretty Flower’s surroundings, sense what she is experiencing and even help her survive moments of danger.
But Pretty Flower is only one part of a much larger mystery.
Theia also communicates with extinct creatures living in different stages of evolutionary history. Over time, she learns that these connections are not random. She is a Prajna, a gifted being who can communicate with evolutionary ancestors along her own family line. Her abilities link her directly to the long chain of life that eventually produced humanity.
That concept gives THEIA a fascinating way to explore evolution.
Instead of treating human ancestry as something distant and abstract, the novel makes it personal. Theia is not simply reading about extinct species or studying fossil evidence. She is experiencing pieces of their worlds through them.
That changes the meaning of survival.
Every person alive today is here because countless ancestors survived long enough to reproduce. Some escaped predators. Others endured environmental change, starvation, disease or extinction-level catastrophes. In THEIA, those distant survivors become part of Theia’s emotional world.
Her connection with a small mammal named Cinnamon, for example, places her near the catastrophic period associated with the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs. Through experiences like this, Theia begins to understand that life on Earth has repeatedly come close to disaster, yet somehow continued.
The question then becomes impossible to ignore: what happens when humanity faces its own major threat?
As Theia learns more about her abilities, she discovers that they may be connected to a responsibility much larger than herself. Her relationship with the past begins pointing toward the future, especially as concerns about mass extinction and environmental collapse become increasingly important to her journey.
This is where THEIA moves beyond an imaginative premise.
The novel uses deep time, evolution, science and speculative mystery to ask something deeply human: if we could actually know the beings whose survival made our existence possible, would we feel differently about protecting what comes after us?
For readers who enjoy science fiction with emotional depth, evolutionary themes, mythology, romance and ambitious questions about humanity’s place in nature, THEIA offers a story that stretches across the history of life itself.
THEIA by L. Richard Feldenberg is currently in the publishing phase and will be available soon.
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