Book excerpt: Oriel is a planet with a roof, a crusted atmospheric ceiling that falls in chunks like oversized snow. The snow is alive, the Ologists joke. It mimics life, but only out of the corner of your eye...or behind your back. Oriel is a far-flung world whose raw potential is contested. A deliberately crashed spaceship throws the planet's atmosphere into turmoil, kick-starting an evolutionary process that accelerates out of control. There is indigenous life on Oriel but in a form unrecognised by man. Soon this, along with man himself, is transmuted into a pastiche of 21st Century Earth, people and buildings grown from the land itself in a matter of days, flourishing briefly before falling into conflict and decay. A few surviving humans struggle to make sense of the new world, whilst others are drawn to Oriel in a hopeless search for answers, redemption, and even lost love.