Books

A lost starship. A lost colony.

A young colony has a terraformed toehold on an alien world, but it faces a schism. The governor cancelled elections long ago, and his men grow more unconstrained with each passing month. So when the governor appropriates the western farmers' personal weapons, Peter Dawe's father sets him a simple task: get them back.

Peter takes the job, but he doesn't know the extra burden his father will impose, the treachery he will face, or that two lives are at stake when it should have been only one.

With only a slender hold on their alien world, human settlers from a marooned starship inhabit a single terraformed valley. As technology frays, as the second generation of settlers cannibalizes its past, and as the governor cancels elections again, tension grows between the city and the western farms.

One Dawe son dead, one in exile, and Thaddeus Dawe now slated to serve as a hostage for his younger brother's crimes, Thaddeus has a task. He must locate the colony’s last terraseeder for the secret enclave another brother works to carve from the northern wilderness. But with the governor's men harboring no love for Dawes, and First Landing’s bureaucracy and its preeminent practitioner having other plans, Thaddeus is not the only one whose life is at risk.

A tale of adventure, loyalty, and love.

The Grandfather tells Kiralee stories. He talks in riddles about bondage and freedom. He whispers to her that her whole world is a lie. Should Kiralee trust him, or does he have an agenda of his own?

It’s the twenty-second century. Humanity’s first and only interstellar starship returns safely. Its mission to discover a habitable planet succeeded beyond all hopes, but there’s one problem. Captain Paolina Nigmatullin of the USS Aeneid left an unsanctioned human colony behind and now stands charged with mutiny.

FAA attorney Terrence Rogers dreams of space, but he spends his days on informed consent for space tourists. The arrival of an alien spaceship may mean real change for a young foreign service officer, but it means something else for Terrence.

A short story.

Can a former attorney general bring justice to the high frontier?

Martin L. Shoemaker, author of “Today I Am Paul”, presents stories of ordinary people doing extraordinary work. Planning, exploring, constructing… living and growing and dying… across the Solar System.

In "Not Close Enough" a team consisting of NASA and international astronauts sits in orbit around Mars but doesn’t get to go to the surface. NASA has decided it’s too risky. Not all the other space agencies agree, but the Bradbury is NASA’s ship. The protagonist, Benjamin Cooper, is the mission commander and has to ride herd on a group of astronauts chomping at the bit to reach the surface. Instead of heading down themselves, they remotely pilot uncrewed landers through the thin Martian atmosphere. It’s not good enough, it's not close enough, and what Cooper doesn’t know is that his crew is going rogue. It just gets better from there.

My other favorite is "Racing to Mars."

When his company demands either a move to Mars or the loss of his job, perpetual plaintiff Lewis Ostrow finds he can't even get a ticket to the world without lawyers.

A short story.

What happens when you go to an empty world and it's not empty?

Gilead Tan and Andrea Fielding survived their stint in the military, got married, signed up to emigrate to a terraformed colony world, and went into cold sleep for the journey from Earth. While they slept, the starship got lost and settled for a different world, a wild world. Three centuries after the founding of a colony on the uncharted planet, Gilead awakens to find humanity slipped back to medieval tech and a feudal structure. Worse, the king who wants Gilead awake won’t let Gilead awaken his wife.

There is no space law in this book.

On the planet Nwwwlf, in the lost colony of First Landing, the original settlers carved out one sylvan valley, a lone outpost where humans flourish. But their bright hopes and best intentions devolved over centuries into a rude replica of medieval feudalism.

Gilead Tan, who had been held captive for centuries in his sleeping cell, survived treachery and pain to free a small group of sleepers. But he and his friends now face the perils of life outside First Landing’s sanctuary–without their powered armor, their tools and technology, or anything else they need save for a few chickens.

Gilead must establish a safehold for his crew, but the alien environment does not welcome them and petty bickering threatens their meager resources. He hopes that a trace of smoke – spotted above a distant ridge – beckons them to a better place.

It doesn't.