Bearing the final remnants of humanity and its genetic archive, the last Skinship to leave a dying, distant-future Earth closes in on the Dragonhead Nebula and the prospect planet that offers resurrection. With Applewhite, the First Navigator, apparently in the process of psychic collapse, a conspiracy emerges to murder him before he can compromise the mission or destroy the ship. Resisting this conspiracy is Monamy, a nonhuman Archivist who alone understands the nature of Applewhite’s breakdown. Inside the uncanny ship, chilling violence and grotesque forms break out. Meanwhile, 1,500 years after the abandonment of the planet, the last man on Earth struggles to survive and, somehow, escape.

Cinematic and intimate, James Reich’s latest novel evokes a yearning for the future evolving into panic, and the contradictions of nostalgia for forgotten things. Like Silent Running and The Man Who Fell to Earth before it, Skinship penetrates the loneliness of an ecological crisis.

JAMES REICH is the author of a quartet of psy-fi titles with Anti-Oedipus Press that include Skinship, The Song My Enemies Sing, Soft Invasions, and Mistah Kurtz! A Prelude to Heart of Darkness. He is also the author of Wilhelm Reich versus The Flying Saucers: An American Tragedy (Punctum Books) as well as The Moth for the Star (7.13 Books) and two novels from Soft Skull Press, Bombshell and I, Judas. His account of innovations in British science fiction is published by Bloomsbury in its “Decades” series, The 1960s, and he was an early contributor to editions of Deep Ends: The J.G. Ballard Anthology. Reich’s work has appeared in Literary Hub, The Brooklyn Rail, CrimeReads, Salon, SPIN Magazine, The Huffington Post, American Book Review, The Rumpus, International Times, Sensitive Skin, and many others. He holds an M.A. in Ecopsychology from Naropa University and is completing a Ph.D. in Psychology with the California Institute of Integral Studies. Born in England in 1971, Reich has lived in New Mexico since 2009.