A Field Guide to Paradise

The Story

Vidya is a botanist on a mission: to recover a rare sample from a distant forest planet. She struggles through a landscape that, though beautiful, seems to be trying to kill her. On top of that her equipment starts to malfunction and she can sense something she cannot see stalking her through the trees.

Does this planet want her gone? As Vidya discovers what the planet truly wants from her, she starts to uncover a terrible truth about herself. But will she be able to acknowledge it?

The Protagonist

Vidya is obsessive and single minded about this mission. She is afraid that if she pauses for a second she will be overtaken by shame at her irresponsibility in letting the sample die.

Her extreme focus on results means she sometimes forgets about the wonder and fascination with plant life that led her to study it in the first place.

Why I want to tell this story…

This story is about life, death and the limits of human knowledge. But I think the question at the heart of this story is how should we, as a species, seek to understand the world outside of us? The story interrogates the pitfalls of seeking to understand the world with an objective and scientific lens, while ignoring our emotional and spiritual selves. I also want to show how the world around us has its own objectives and agency beyond us and is observing us right back.

Ultimately, in this story I am trying to make peace with the things I don’t know and the things I cannot plan for. It is a tribute to the things we know, not through scientific observation, but through feelings and intuition.