Free book promotion on Amazon 12/30/2022 - 12/31/2022!
In Overman’s SF series-starter, the crew of a nascent Mars colony and a lunar pilot struggling with addiction play key roles in a crisis as a fleet of alien ships approaches Earth.
This outer-space epic is set on multiple stages in the year 2061. A Louisianan named Ben Allspot employs his formidable skills as a pilot, doing a job on Earth’s moon to send money back to his estranged family, but everything he does is tainted by his all-consuming addiction to Carbodine—an insidious performance-enhancing narcotic that escapes routine drug testing. The drug is particularly plentiful in the ramshackle corporate complex where he works. On Mars, eight pioneering astronauts arrive on a three-year NASA mission to establish a colonial beachhead. Virtually from the start, an accident tests their problem-solving skills and depletes their resources, forcing them to search for frozen water sources. This, in turn, leads to the discovery of ancient Martian organisms, a scientific milestone that, on Earth, triggers the wrath of a Houston-based fundamentalist Christian church. Meanwhile, deep in the cosmos, a sentient race of “Trees” (creatures that become rooted during a plantlike phase) has risen to staggering intellectual and technological heights. They’ve also become enslaved by weasel-like mammals called the Koombar. When the latter had nearly destroyed themselves with greed, belligerence, and shortsightedness, the merciful Trees violated their noninterference policy to rescue them, but the Koombar betrayed them. Meanwhile, four black, cylindrical, faster-than-light machines have been detected beyond the orbit of Pluto, headed toward Earth.