Fiction · The Landing · Book 1

The Landing: Arrival

A stranded scientist, a damaged survey ship, and a valley where the readings look a lot like magic.

Cover of The Landing: Arrival by Slop Dealer
  • Cozy sci-fantasy
  • The Landing, Book 1
  • 511 pages
  • February 14, 2026
  • Kindle on Amazon

About this book

Callum Wren is a xenoanthropologist whose survey ship goes down hard in a valley that was never in the mission plan. The hook is quiet competence: patch the hull, keep the ship's AI talking, share the food, and learn the local rules before the local rules learn you.

Arrival covers the crash and first contact. It is survival fiction built from practical work rather than combat: shelter, tools, trust, and the slow discovery that the valley's strangeness behaves more like weather than like a spell list.

Reading order

  1. The Landing: Arrival — this book, start here
  2. The Landing: Roots — the winter waystation and the settlement taking shape