Temple of the Double Sun

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Book 1 of the MAALSTROM SERIES of sci-fi / fantasy novels by Glenn Lazar Roberts

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OUR NEW HOME…  Milo Psi-2, a shy ecologist, is one of 200 colonists from Earth on a one-way voyage to a new planet that orbits a double sun. He’s assigned several wives to help populate the lush and uninhabited landscape, but for the pesky insect life-forms. Paradise is shaken as bizarre births shock the colony and women begin to disappear. As panic and murder sweep the colony, a winged humanoid swoops in and steals a corpse. Seeking answers to the catastrophe, Milo escapes the chaos and is captured and taken to a stone temple where the consequence of his people’s colonization comes to horrific light.

This novel tells the story of the original colonists from Earth as they land on the virgin uninhabited planet Maalstrom. For readers of Maalstrom and The Selk King who were wondering how it all started and why there are occasional remnants of a prior technical society, the novel Temple of the Double Sun will answer all your questions.

NOTE TO READERS: IT IS ADVISABLE TO READ THE MAALSTROM SERIES IN PROPER ORDER.

BOOK 1: TEMPLE OF THE DOUBLE SUN

BOOK 2: MAALSTROM

BOOK 3: THE SELK KING

REVIEW: Intriguing… prose style [like] Heinlein/[H.G.]Wells magisterium... -Geoff .A.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR ABOUT THE MAALSTROM SERIES.

Maalstrom was begun in the autumn of 1975 on a manual typewriter “in a smoke-filled haze” as a twenty-year old college sophomore. This was the first fiction I wrote. Most was completed in two months. The Selk King came later and took four years to write.

The story: long ago, colonists from Earth landed on Maalstrom, a newly discovered planet circling a double-sun. For the full story of this colonization, see Temple of the Double Sun published by TWB Press, the new Book 1 of the Maalstrom Series.

The colonists were exposed to a species of native wasp and their DNA merged with the wasp DNA. Abandoning the other colonists, some of the ‘infected’ women secluded themselves in shelters which they built around water springs and began giving birth insect-fashion, their male offspring living outside the shelters while their female offspring remained confined inside.

These ‘wasp-queens’ found their lifespans greatly extended. Vensa was one of the original colonists, already thousands of years old when she gave birth to Flores and Amina, her original shelter, which Flores stumbled across in the cavern beneath Ven’s Temple, then crumbling and long since surmounted by the imposing cloistered Temple.

In the way of all mortals, Flores will die, but Amina will live for millennia, and if adequately protected by the unruly men exiled to the ‘outer slums’ of Vensa’s City, give birth to many generations. Amina’s manipulative and selfish behavior is essential to the survival of her quasi-insect species, to which Flores belongs.

The changes in DNA were not confined to the colonist-queens, however, but also created the malkops, or ‘selks,’ resulting in a complex biological interdependence between the queens in their temples, the men in their cities, the malkops flying above, the plant-men, and Atasan.

That is the background—a swashbuckling Conan-style tale of bloody encounters on an alien planet that can be read merely for fun. The symbolism goes further.

Maalstrom is the product of researches in anthropology, archaeology, and the psychology and sociology of religion. Religious myth—or, as that is a redundant phrase, just myth—organizes all human societies. It is social glue, the common values and thought patterns that hold a people together and enable them to communicate and cooperate. Myth is not only for ‘primitive people over there’—it is everything that you know, and what you think you know. A human without myth is the ultimate contradiction; there never has been, and never can be, humans without myth.

Every person with unique values and insights knows well the consequences of straying outside the boundaries of a society’s myths. They become heretics. Flores is such a heretic. Or rather becomes one through the process of discovering the biological realities of his insect species, and the supra-factual nature of its myths. These myths are enforced by an interplay of custom, religion, economics, ideology, and ultimately raw force. No society for long allows heretics to publicly undermine the social glue that allows its society to function. Thus the City of Ven rejects Flores.

But Flores, by his Will to Power, will not be stopped by convention and searches for a way to transcend his society’s myths and acquire Ultimate Knowledge. The crystal bracelets symbolize the mystical insight that grant this Knowledge. Yezd is the shaman who transmits the technique. The selks are the semi-divine messengers who guard access to Heaven, and if properly addressed, will transmit the hero’s questions to the Divine.

Atasan is an anagram for Satan, the Ruler of the physical world. In Maalstrom, I provide an insight into the role of this Ruler, and I like to think, a unique and provocative explanation of the existence of evil (see Macius’ rendition to Flores of Maalstrom’s dominant Creation Myth while in Yezd’s castle). Few readers, if any, seem to have understood the significance of what Macius said.

Maalstrom, its sequel The Selk King, and its prequel Temple of the Double Sun are a single story. In The Selk King, in the Chapter titled ‘Revelations’, the reader will find solutions to many of the puzzles underlying Maalstrom’s plot—just before Flores, having acquired mystical insight using his new-found shaman’s technique, storms the ramparts of Heaven. Few also have understood the mythical and philosophical significance of Flores’ invasion of the selks’ city in the clouds.

But don’t expect me to be your Shaman. Whatever you know, or think you know, myth lies heavy not only upon Flores’ perception, but on the reader’s as well. Behind the Veil, Secrets lurk. Such is the nature of reality, on alien planets like Maalstrom as much as on Earth.

Maalstrom and The Selk King—now with Book 1: Temple of the Double Sun—I hope remain as relevant to the Seeker-of-Knowledge’s efforts to break free of society’s conventions and penetrate the Veil as when written. Dark, insightful and Just Plain Weird.

—Glenn Lazar Roberts
updated
August 22, 2025