Sky So Big & Black

At the end of the twenty-first century, Earth is under the control of a single intelligence, the apparently benign One True. Mars, meanwhile, is slowly terraforming, and the human settlers there are still free of One True's control...but they need a pressure suits to survive outside, and it will be a century or more before the planet's fit for terrestrial life.

Terpsichore Murray is growing up on Mars. She wants to quit school and become, like her father, an ecoprospector. He has other ideas: he wants her to stay in school. He does want her along on his next long trip but only to conduct a group of younger kids from the highlands at Mars's equator back to school in Wells City.

What happens next will change Terpsichore, will change Mars, and will open the door to a new chapter in the history of intelligent beings in the solar system . . . all of them.

"John Barnes convinces. He may well be the new writer on whom the mantle of Robert Heinlein falls." -Poul Anderson

"John Barnes knows how to make readers care. . . . Barnes combines philosophical speculation, high-speed action, and character development in a way that is the hallmark of a master." -Los Angeles Reader

Terpichore Murray is growing up on Mars. She wants to quit school and become an eco-prospector like her father. He has other ideas; not only does he want her to stay in school, he wants her along on his next long trip conducting a group of younger kids from the highlands at Mars's equator back to school in Wells City.

Early in the trip, disaster strikes-and it's up to Terry, without adult help, to get the survivors to safety, through several hundred miles of Martian wilderness. In the process, she will encounter the self-engineered "Mars-form" humans, usually shunned by the regular colonists-and One True, the collective intelligence that dominates Earth and from whom the Mars colonists are all separated. In the process she may well come of age and change the course of human history in the solar system . . . if Mars doesn't kill her first.

John Barnes is the award-winning author of Orbital Romance, A Million Open Doors, Mother of Storms, Earth Made of Glass, The Merchants of Souls, Candle, and many other novels. With Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin, he wrote the novels Encounter with Tiber and The Return. He lives in Colorado.