A world called solitude

Birk Aaland is a refugee from Earth's tyrannical government. He finds himself stranded on an uncharted planet, which seems to be inhabited. His explorations reveal long-deserted cities perfectly maintained by the robot servants of their former inhabitants. Thus he becomes the marooned king of an isolated kingdom of machines. His life is a painfully lonely one and he spends eleven years without any human contact or companionship, tortured by memories of his former life on Earth and increasingly unable to imagine returning to it. Then his fitful peace is shattered when a spaceship crashes on…