About The Book

ALFIE: Earth's Last Hope

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What if after years of extensive exploration of the Milky Way, we find out that the Earth is the only planet able to support life?

Author Ignacio Bunster-Ossa presents an epic sci-fi tale that explores a future where humanity is faced with having to save the only planet it can ever call home.

Housed in millions of pods in geosynchronous orbit, people have learned to enjoy a carefree and everlasting existence. Below, a legion of terranauts, tasked with saving the biodiversity of the planet, travail the continents and deliver to the orbital world spellbinding images of the Earth’s pristine flora and fauna.

Now, Homo-spaciens must guard Nature and over time populate other orbs with the gathered seeds. But all is not well. Resistors are plotting to recolonize the planet, mining exotic biota from deep in Amazonia to finance the operation. The sinful plan comes to life and innocent terranauts risk all to expose the perpetrators. If they fail, the planet’s pristine aura will once again be compromised. But the terranauts are not alone. An alien intelligence is following their every step and secretly intercedes to secure a just, if tragic, outcome. Humanity will never be the same.

In this epic story of good and evil, Author Ignacio Bunster-Ossa immerses the reader into bi-polar worlds: one for people, supported by hyper-advanced technology, and another strictly for wildlife, bio-regulated as Darwin posited in On the Origin of the Species. In ALFIE these worlds collide in the only way they can: over the elemental need to sustain life, drawing out vice and virtue in equal measures.

About The Author

Ignacio F. Bunster-Ossa ​

Author Ignacio Bunster-Ossa

Ignacio F. Bunster-Ossa is a Philadelphia-based award-winning landscape architect and urban designer. He is the author of “Reconsidering Ian McHarg: the Future re of Urban Ecology,” “Of Leaves, Limbs, and Hope: A Portrait of Philadelphia’s Urban Forest in Times of a Pandemic,” and “ALFIE: Earth’s Last Hope,” a work of science fiction that examines the role of artificial intelligence in advancing environmentalism. 

He periodically teaches and lectures on landscape architecture in leading universities, nationally and internationally. He serves on academic and non-governmental advisory boards, such as the Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology, and Nature Sacred, a non-profit organization devoted to the provision of nature-based public health.

From the Author

​ As a landscape architect trained in ecological planning and design, it is impossible not to ponder what our relationship to nature should be. Four scenarios come to mind.
1: We continue to exploit nature in pursuit of economic progress, endangered species and wildlife be damned.
2: We find a balanced coexistence with nature or, as Ian L. McHarg, a historic figure in the profession of landscape architecture professed in the late nineteen sixties, we "design with nature."
3: We create a New Nature through selective species' protection, animal in-breeding, plant hybridization and genetic alteration, and laboratory-induced life. In other words, we become God.
4: We come to regard nature as precious beyond calculation. Despoiled landscapes are restored, natural habitats are protected, and humanity instead seeks a life-of-plenty elsewhere.
All four scenarios are presently at work. Alarms have been ringing about the first scenario for years, as perhaps most chillingly documented by Elizabeth Kolbert in The Sixth Extinction. The second scenario—acknowledging the need to live with nature—has roots in the 1963 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora. The United States' Endangered Species Act, enacted into law in 1973, also comes to mind.
The third scenario is as old as the domestication of wolves to breed working dogs, or that of wild maize to make corn. Today, as an example, it takes the form of genetically modified organisms (GMO).
Rooted in the work of Gerard K. O’Neil and his 1976 book The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space, the fourth scenario is afoot today via the entrepreneurial efforts of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and their space companies, Blue Origin and Space X, respectively. The goal: to transform homo-sapiens into “homo spaciens.”
ALFIE explores the fourth scenario, underpinned by a conservation ethic in extremis. It also explores the role of artificial intelligence in causing humanity’s leap to a space-faring species—hence the story’s recurring reference to the most famous superintelligence ever imagined.
I hope ALFIE does more than invite curiosity into a brand-new world: that it causes reflection about our “nest” and, in the context of the known universe, draws a greater measure of how precious it is. If it generates discussions about the necessary (if not impending) demise of anthropocentrism, all the better.

Book Excerpt

Testimonials

Drawing on science icons like Hal in 2001 – A Space Odyssey, the author takes you to a distant time and place to look upon Earth as it might become if humans left the planet and ecology was allowed to reign. Bunster-Ossa deftly mixes science, intrigue, murder, and human emotions, with a touch of humor, to weave a tale that gives hope and challenge to our world today. And there are enough twists and turns to keep one guessing. This is a clever, smart read.
Amazon Reviewer
ALFIE: Earth's Last Hope will delight hard sci-fi readers with its contrasts between a high-tech future's ability to mitigate the ecological devastation of Earth and the realization that Earth's environmental degradation and abuse are not something to flee from; but tasks important to acknowledge and fix…highly recommended to sci-fi and social issues readers, not just for its futuristic focus, but for its many considerations of human impacts on the planet. These portraits venture into realms of good, evil, and the ways in which mankind burns itself in the process of plundering the world.
D. DonovanMidwest Book Review, Senior Reviewer
This is by far the most enjoyable science fiction book I've read so far…This book is recommended for adults who enjoy science fiction novels and are curious about what the world might look like if humans continue on their destructive path. I enjoyed so many parts of this book, but I can't go into any more detail, so I'll leave it to you to read and decide for yourself…With all of the positives mentioned in this book, it deserves nothing less than five out of five stars.
Online Book Club
Dropping us immediately into a compelling story…Bunster-Ossa stimulates an unfolding inquiry into our relationship with the natural world upon which we rely. Along the way, the story pulls you into an entirely human drama. Existential choices must be made in response to the climate crisis and our wider impact on Earth's environment; but regardless of the choice, the full range of human experience will be along for the ride.
Amazon Reviewer
What a saga—as in an ancient, telling odyssey. Life on Earth has become unsustainable through irresponsible human behavior and unchecked environmental degradation. Visionaries emerge with an answer: a mass exodus from the planet to interconnected terrestrial colonies, allowing the Earth to restore itself. Read this intriguing utopian/dystopian(?) novel (you decide). An existential question hovers over the book. Yes, “What’s it all about...?” You will intuit it.
Amazon Reviewer
One of the best books in my library. Ignacio weaves a dramatic and relatable story of an alternate life tethered to Earth…What a magical ride that leaves you realizing this could happen soon if we are not respectful of the land and sea. I cannot wait to see the book adapted into a science-fiction movie!!!
Amazon Reviewer
…This book swept me up and captivated my imagination from the onset…The book was hard to put down and I recommend everyone with any interest in our environment read this and contemplate the choices as it may very well be a prophecy for future generations.
Amazon Reviewer
You are there from the opening pages of a book that conveys an immediacy as though you were a lens witnessing what the characters are seeing. From a sense of suffering to laughing out loud, from familial affection to brutal murder the reader wonders what will happen next. For fans of science fiction, this is a book that covers more than the bases. When I finished and started rereading passages, I almost read the whole thing again. A must-read.
Amazon Reviewer
This is an amazing vision for the future of our planet told in a creative and imaginative story that will blow your mind. Each page uncovers a new look into daily life in our future and makes very obvious what we will need to do to survive and save our planet. Very thought-provoking and insightful point of view told thru the lens of many of the ordinary personalities we all already know, even if they are centuries in our future...LOVED IT!
Amazon Reviewer
This science fiction novel posits a future where humankind lives in orbit around Planet Earth, and in doing so highlights one possible solution to climate change. Nature in this story is a palpable force…This skilled and celebrated landscape architect brings Earth’s flora and fauna to life in great detail… Add richly imagined technology and built environments and feisty characters into the mix and you have all the ingredients for a great ride.
Amazon Reviewer
Readers thinking about "What's next" might want to check out Ignacio Bunster-Ossa. He is a landscape architect and writer who cultivates the earth and recycles its stories. As Open AI colonizes our current stories…Nice timing!
Amazon Reviewer

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