Burning Night - Paperback

by Alan Smale (Author)

On July 4, 1983, Vivian Carter and her NASA crew of seven set off on an audacious double flyby of Venus and Mars, a two-year mission with repurposed Apollo technology that will push their ingenuity and resourcefulness to the limit. Meanwhile, superpower conflicts escalate on Earth, mirrored by a dangerously unstable arms race and battles for valuable mineral resources on the Moon. Full-up lunar military actions and treacherous sneak attacks decimate Vivian's friends, allies and colleagues on both sides of the Iron Curtain and threaten everything she has worked to achieve.

Vivian's odyssey is a high adventure that will bring mankind new knowledge and unimagined insights ... just as the risk of worldwide nuclear war has never been greater. Now, on her triumphant return in 1985, Vivian Carter's path inevitably brings her back to where she began: a desperate rescue mission with no NASA support and no safety net, to a dangerous, war-torn Moon where she will be hard pressed to tell friend from foe.

In the concluding volume of Alan Smale's highly acclaimed Apollo Rising series ("A nail-biting thriller."-Publishers Weekly) humanity faces a stark choice: a bright new interplanetary future ... or nuclear apocalypse on two worlds.

Author Biography

Alan Smale is an award-winning science fiction (hard SF and alternate history) and fantasy author who has sold over fifty pieces of short fiction to Asimov's, Galaxy's Edge, Abyss & Apex, and other magazines and anthologies. His short story "Gunpowder Treason" earned him a second Sidewise Award in 2022. His non-fiction essays have appeared in Lightspeed, Journey Planet, and Galaxy's Edge. Alan grew up in England, and received degrees in Physics and Astrophysics from Oxford University. Until recently he performed research into Galactic neutron star and black hole binary systems at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, and served as the Director of one of NASA's big-three astrophysical data archives.