Kings of the High Frontier - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0966566254 ISBN 13: 9780966566253

Inhaltsangabe

Three-time Prometheus Award winner Victor Koman (Millennium: Weeds), who sicced an assassin on God in The Jehovah Contract and imploded the abortion controversy in Solomon's Knife, brings us his epic novel of humanity's next stage of evolution: the jump into Space.

Tammy Reis, beautiful NASA Space Shuttle commander, works for the most highly funded, technologically advanced space program in the world. So why do nightmares of the Challenger disaster haunt her sleep? And why is NASA incapable of recapturing the stunning successes it once achieved?

Visionary spacecraft designer Gerry Cooper struggles at his tiny rocket company in the Mojave Desert. Who in the world wants him stopped -- or dead?

One-armed billionaire playboy Laurence Poubelle hopes to build his own orbital X-15. Can his keen marketing skills overcome a nation hostile to wealth and contemptuous of adventure?

Meanwhile, the horror of the Challenger tragedy threatens to repeat itself on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral. Standing at ground zero, NASA engineer Jack Lundy races the countdown to prevent the deadliest space disaster of all.

While bureaucrats and businessmen publicly battle for the high ground, a young descendant of the legendary Davy Crockett secretly constructs a single-stage-to-orbit rocket deep inside an abandoned warehouse in the South Bronx. Will he and his NYU classmates survive when NORAD detects the launch that blows the lid off the greatest conspiracy in the history of mankind?

Tammy Reis -- stripped of her astronaut wings for defending herself against a congressman's zero-gravity rape -- is recruited by the National Security Agency to infiltrate the stronghold of a er-rich smuggler who schemes to place a massive space station into orbit with a single, spectacular launch. When she discovers the true nature of his secret plan, she faces an impossible choice between duty to her government or freedom from her -- and humanity's -- nightmare.

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Victor Koman is the author of eight novels and is at this moment working on his ninth. A native Californian, Koman wrote the underground classic millennial-noir novel The Jehovah Contract and the medical thriller Solomon's Knife. Both novels won the Prometheus Award in their respective years.

The Jehovah Contract was written in 1978 and '79. It was first published in 1985 -- in Bavaria (by publisher Heyne Verlag) -- as a German language paperback titled Der Jehova-Vertrag. Ray Bradbury says of Koman's first novel, "The Jehovah Contract has a fascinating concept, imaginatively delivered," and of Koman, "Would that there were a dozen more writers like him in the field." Solomon's Knife, also available from Amazon.com, was written in 1988. Politically potent, it is a medical thriller and courtroom drama that shatters the moribund philosophies clinging to the abortion dilemma and creates a radical fusion of Pro-Life and Pro-Choice forces when a new medical technique threatens to make abortion obsolete. Franklin Watts published the hardcover in 1989 and it won the Prometheus Award (making Koman the first two-time winner) in 1990. A German translation, Der Eingriff, came out in 1991 from Goldmann Verlag. He co-wrote (with Andrew J. Offutt), two novels in the SPACEWAYS saga: #13, Jonuta Rising! and #17, The Carnadyne Horde, published by Berkley Books in 1983 and 1984. Both were issued under the house name "John Cleve."

Koman's short story "Bootstrap Enterprise" appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and was noted by critic Ellen Datlow as one of the best stories of 1994. His stories have also appeared in Fred Olen Ray's Weird Menace, Paul Sammon's The King is Dead -- Tales of Elvis Postmortem, Ed Kramer's Dark Destiny II and Dark Destiny III, as well as Kramer's and Brad Linaweaver's Free Space.

His latest novel, Kings of the High Frontier, won the Prometheus Award in 1997, making him the first three-time winner of the solid-gold prize. The novel was the first exclusively Web-available novel to win such an award...and went on to earn a spot on the Preliminary Ballot for the Science-Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America's prestigious Nebula Award.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction calls Kings "an intriguing, exhilarating, thought-provoking and, yes, sprawling novel that brings back the sense of wonder that drew so many of us into science-fiction in the first place." A community activist with a quixotic sense of what's important, Koman was instrumental in preventing the destruction of Disneyland's last bubble-topped Mark III monorail ("Old Red"), generating a one-man public relations campaign that resulted in nationwide news coverage. The Walt Disney Company subsequently saved, restored, and converted the historic monorail fuselage into a street-legal promotional vehicle. Koman has also appeared as an extra in several films, including Star Trek -- The Motion Picture, CyberZone, Nightshade, Rapid Assault, Mom's Outta Sight, X-Ray Kid, Billy Frankenstein, and Little Miss Magic (in which his actress daughter, Vanessa Koman, played the title role). He lives in southern California with his wife, Veronica, and daughter, Vanessa, as well as their cat and goldfish.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

PROLOGUE I dreamed of falling out of the sky, of burning up, of feeling intense pain, then blackness, then nothing. -- Brian O'Leary, The Making of an Ex-Astronaut

Falling...

Falling...

Nine miles and more.

The ocean and sky merged into one seamless blue-grey blur as she dropped in free fall for a terrifying eternity. Hands that must have been hers reached for the helmet behind and above her head, but fear-clenched fingers refused to obey her commands.

A whistling sound outside intensified until it swelled into a banshee howl of death. The crew cabin shifted about with a gut-wrenching jolt. Wires and control cables trailing behind the shattered orbiter gripped the thickening atmosphere, acting like vanes to stabilize the cabin's descent. Now she clearly saw where they were doomed to die.

No one could save them. Something had gone terribly wrong and nothing could stop their horrible plunge into the Atlantic.

It had happened at throttleup. The shuttle started to oscillate. Then the explosion. Then an awful lurch as the crew cabin broke free and -- no longer aerodynamically streamlined -- hit the thin atmosphere and began to tumble wildly.

One of them screamed. That she heard it at all meant that the compartment still held pressure. Atmospheric forces acted upon the cabin, slowing the huge piece of the demolished orbiter, shoving them forward against their restraining straps. As if a giant's hand dragged them toward the earth, she felt a mighty force in front of her pull them down, down, downward to the sea.

She wanted to scream but no breath escaped her frozen lungs. The orbiter contained no ejection seats, the controls of the ruined crew cabin connected to nothing, the wings and rudder and elevons trailed somewhere far away, fluttering slowly in pieces toward the ocean.

Her tortured mind frantically sought some way to survive, but only one horrifying realization seized her terror-consumed thoughts.

They lied!

The screaming outside grew louder than even the thundering roar of liftoff. They plummeted straight toward a delicate mosaic of waves in the wall of water below.

It couldn't be much longer, could it? Did Houston know they were alive?

Her family watched from the Cape. Watched this!

The looser cables ripped away from the cabin with the shattering crack of gunshots.

Ahead of her -- below her -- glittered the tiny white splashes of a frolicking pod of dolphins.

"Oh, God!"

Tammy Reis awakened an instant before impact. She always did.

Heart racing, sweat-soaked, she ran a pale, trembling hand through her neck-length sable hair, then reached toward the night stand. The cool condensation on the water glass sent a chill through her fingers and palm. She shuddered and took a long drink.

The explosion of the space shuttle Challenger years before still haunted her dreams. For a space shuttle commander, such nightmares constituted a betrayal by that most intimate of enemies, her subconscious mind.

She refused to submit. After every night of terror in which she fell to her death, Tammy Reis seized the dawn with an angry fervor, a renewed conviction that she would not permit the spectre of death to wrap its dark claws once more around the Shuttle. She possessed the power -- the will -- to steer NASA toward its destiny. Death, even her own death, served a higher cause if it came while reaching, not cowering. And in every morning light that pierced the darkness of her private hell, she clenched her fist up at Fate and swore anew that she would triumph.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0966566254
• ISBN 13: 9780966566253
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar