by Terry BirdgenawPublish: Jun 04, 2026 Series: The Antunite ChroniclesAction & AdventureScience FictionTeen & Young Adult
Book Overview
Is Earth ready for an extraterrestrial visitor? Is the alien prepared for what awaits him?
Dee didn't plan to become the world's most wanted illegal alien. He just wanted to find his friends.
A cyborg ANT from Bilaluna, Dee crash-lands in a Mexican cenote and embarks on an epic road trip from the Yucatan to the Yukon across a splintered near-future America. He travels with only a syntax generator and a bag of cicadas and has little understanding of human politics. He befriends Earth insects, rescues kidnapped teens, and battles the elements and a trigger-happy border patrol. His key ally? Seka, a brilliant Indigenous chemist with a sordid past, a spirit strong enough to tame grizzlies, and a heart warm enough to melt through his hard exoskeleton.
But as ICE agents close in and climate disasters escalate, Dee realizes his warning about environmental collapse might come too late. Can Dee and Seka spark the change Earth desperately needs?
Find out in Cyborg Contact, an action-packed cli-fi road trip featuring first contact, political satire, and the ultimate fish-out-of-water hero. Grab your copy to ride shotgun with the galaxy's most charming ANT today!
Tropes
First contact, fish-out-of-water, road trip adventure, climate apocalypse, unlikely romance, found family, political satire.
Action & AdventureScience FictionTeen & Young Adult
BIOGRAPHY The author, Terry Birdgenaw, is a Metis of Oji-Cree, English, Scottish, Dutch and French-Canadian heritage, whose mother’s first cousin was a long-time lead elder of the Metis Nation of Canada. However, Terry would argue that by moving away from the Oji-Cree territory a few generations ago, his family became assimilated by European Canadian culture. Yet, Terry has long been fascinated by the story of his ancestor, Mistigoose, the indigenous Canadian woman who was the first to welcome a European into his mother’s family line.
Mistigoose was both a tragic figure and an inspiration for this series. Her tragedy was that she drowned herself while distraught over the loss of her first son William, whom her British husband Robert had taken permanently to England. Against her will, the author’s fifth great grandfather wanted to ensure their son would be eligible to receive a handsome inheritance promised to his heir. Ironically, as British law prohibited Metis from owning property, William never received his rightful inheritance, so his translocation and mother’s death were both in vain.
The translation of Mistigoose, an Oji-Cree word, inspired parts of the story told in The Antunites Chronicles. In English, Mistigoose means little branch or twig. The title character of Antuna’s Story, whose own mother drowned, used a twig in a selfless effort to save her newfound friend Dinomite. The resolution of the second book in the series, The Rise and Fall of Antocracy, also depended on the insectoids’ realization that they needed tiny insects to break down little branches to generate the new soil required to rehabilitate their spent lands.
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