Months I've spent toiling away in my own personal word mine ... or should I say chipping away at my construction of written life-likeness like a sculptor,  removing a few syllables here, an extra word there -- oh, there's a whole huge rumpus of a prologue I don't need up here at the front. Well, that has to go. I work on my books too much, but I'm proud of them when I let them go. So without further ado, I shove it out front and send it off to kindergarten. What if your planet were being terraformed by an outside entity and there was nothing you could do? THIS LAND Days after a new star appears in the sky, the simple folk of the sleepy fishing community of Bay Banyon are attacked by creatures unlike any they’ve seen before.

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For the gaps in my knowledge.

The Venera (Cyrillic: Венера) series probes were developed by the Soviet Union between 1961 and 1984 to gather data from Venus, Venera being the Russian name for Venus. As with some of the Soviet Union's other planetary probes, the later versions were launched in pairs with a second vehicle being launched soon after the first of the pair.

Ten probes from the Venera series successfully landed on Venus and transmitted data from the surface, including the two Vega program and Venera-Halley probes. In addition, thirteen Venera probes successfully transmitted data from the atmosphere of Venus.

Among the other results, probes of the series became the first man-made devices to enter the atmosphere of another planet (Venera 4 on October 18, 1967), to make a soft landing on another planet (Venera 7 on December 15, 1970), to return images from the planetary surface (Venera 9 on June 8, 1975), and to perform high-resolution radar mapping studies of Venus (Venera 15 on June 2, 1983). So, the entire series could be considered highly successful. Unfortunately the surface conditions on Venus are extreme, which meant that the probes only survived on the surface for a duration of 23 minutes (initial probes) up to about two hours (final probes).