When Father Joshua McDowell enters one of the twenty-nine landing sites guarded by the Army, the slow process of integration of aliens into human society.

Later, on one of her trips to Winnipeg to buy more of the new drug Blur, Alissa Trang uses her ever-present camera to film the first wave of "Wantas" moving into Winnipeg. She soon befriends some of the aliens and makes countless downloadable "Netstream" movies of her talks with them.

Shontera Johnson, a single mother in Milwaukee struggling to get by, sees her life change forever when the aliens come to the brewery where she works. Within two weeks of their starting day, the brewery explodes. Shontera survives, but when a second explosion occurs at a grain elevator on the same day, the aliens become public enemy number one.

A week before it blew up, Tim "Skin" Blair had just started working at that elevator, along with a handful of Wannoshay. He also escapes unscathed, and his mix of fear, dread, and fascination for the aliens grows.

As time passes, all four humans touched by the Wannoshay are compelled to gather at the "mother ship" to learn what happened and try to help. Meanwhile, the two fatal explosions are blamed on the aliens, and they are placed into internment camps across the Midwest.

Joshua, Alissa, Shontera, and Skin are compelled to find common ground between human and alien, soon, because the aliens are dying, and their sickness appears to be spreading to humans.

The mother ship holds the secrets of the Wannoshay, but time is running out on all sides. The humans soon discover the "true history" of the Wannoshay, a secret that explains the aliens' sickness and forces the humans to make painful choices about the best way to help the Wantas, choices that could take them away from their own people, not to mention their own planet.

THE WANNOSHAY CYCLE is a 90,000-word science fiction novel by Michael Jasper. Read an excerpt online.

"Jasper imagines what first contact might be beyond Wellsian invasion—not hostile, necessarily, on either side, but rife with conflict due to misunderstandings and the problems faced by both cultures." —Regina Schroeder, Booklist (for THE WANNOSHAY CYCLE)

Jasper has a real gift for evoking a mood, and for the most part, manages to make the Wannoshay seem genuinely, creepily alien and inexplicable. —Kirkus Reviews (for THE WANNOSHAY CYCLE)

"In his third novel, speculative-fiction rising star Jasper offers a finely nuanced blend of fantasy and horror." — Carl Hays, Booklist (for A GATHERING OF DOORWAYS)

"While this world may seem darker and more dystopian by the day, avid, talented newcomers like Jasper help us keep the faith." — Faren Miller, Locus (for GUNNING FOR THE BUDDHA)