John Gottschalk did not expect to find himself the sole survivor of a mission into a black hole.

Nor did he expect to find any survivors aboard the mangled habitat swallowed up years before. And he most certainly did not expect to find the original Earth colony cowering under the tyranny of Ophelian mercenaries, the biggest, baddest, most studiously sociopathic soldiers in the galaxy.

Now a unique commodity, John becomes a human ping-pong ball in the Ophelians' version of the Social Contract — Survival of the Screwingest.

But hope, of an offbeat sort, looms as an exuberant six-and-a-half-foot, blade-centric teenager who styles herself "Devray, Conqueror of Worlds!" ("Really, I'm just starting") stakes her own claim.

A fast-paced carousel of action and humor, set against a gripping saga of love and revenge, Absent From Felicity will take you to worlds on the far boundaries of imagination.