EXPLORER — Book One of The Anthanian Imperative Trilogy
What’s the book about? To answer that question, I would like to have you use your imagination for a few minutes—
Imagine, if you will, the planet you live on—your home planet—is dying—
You live on the planet Anthanos which is tidally locked to an orange-red sun in the early stages of becoming a red giant. You live on the terminator of the planet, the dividing line between the hot and cold sides. You call this area the Lifezone. But the air temperature is slowly rising as the planet gets hotter and hotter. The surface of that immense sun is getting closer and closer. The wind that sweeps across the surface of your planet is growing stronger and stronger. Eventually that sun out there, that big, hot incandescent sphere, will go nova and incinerate your planet and all the others in the solar system.
What can you do?
There’s only one thing you can do—colonize another planet outside your solar system.
And so the inhabitants of Anthanos began a search for their new home. They set standards for the planet they would accept. It should be a wonderful place to live. It didn’t have to be perfect, but it shouldn’t have any excessive heat or cold, and no violent wind. After all, no one wants to move to another planet like the one they live on, suffering through the death throes of the central sun.
But first they had to find that planet. And once they found it, they had to determine if it had everything they wanted—everything they needed—to live on its surface. Is it in the habitable zone? Does it have a magnetic field? Is its sun stable and not likely to go nova?
These were the questions that faced the people of Anthanos. They found a lovely blue planet that had everything they were looking for: the appropriate temperature, plenty of water, an oxygen-rich atmosphere, vast areas of a solid surface to live on . . . it seemed to be the almost perfect planet they wanted. They sent a team of ten explorers to check it out. The cream of the crop. The best they had.
But what those explorers found when they got there was so much more than just the lovely blue planet they were expecting . . .
This is EXPLORER, the story of those explorers.
Note in passing: I expect that Explorer will be published late in 2023, or early in 2024. Watch this website for details.