The First Sol - The prequel to ICARUS, and I'm looking for its first readers

Four years before the events of ICARUS, a young Russian engineer named Elena Markova lands at a worn-down mining outpost on Mars. There is no hero's welcome. Only dust, low gravity, a community forged by sheer survival, and a planet that does not want her.

The First Sol is a slow, tactile, human story: Martian dust on the visor, the metal of the mine felt through your boots, the raw humor of Russian work culture, and the quiet hunger for connection in a place where everything is about staying alive. If you love quiet, detailed, character-driven science fiction, or if that is what drew you to ICARUS, this one is for you.

If you're new here, this is a good place to start. The First Sol stands on its own; you don't need to know ICARUS to read it. And if you've already been to Vostok, now you can see how it all began, years before the great storm.

The book is nearing the end, and before it's published I'd like to put it into a few readers' hands. Here is how it opens:

The First Sol - first scene

Would you like to be one of my beta readers?

Here's how it works: I'll send the book to you chapter by chapter, by email. You can stop at any time, no strings attached; if you don't ask for more, that's perfectly fine. In return, all I ask is that when you request the next part, you write a few sentences reacting to the previous one. The book is short (~100 pages), the round runs about 2 to 4 weeks, and it's available in both English and Hungarian.

If you're in, sign up here: https://forms.gle/UDYYosXHqpYpBSXV7

Thank you for joining me

Zsolt Bugarszki