Dark Ararat
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Dark Ararat is the fifth novel in an overarching masterpiece. It extends into interstellar space Brian Stableford's ambitious ongoing future history series begun in Inherit the Earth and continued in The Architects of Emortality, The Fountains of Youth, and The Cassandra Complex.
Hundreds of years in our future, humanity is expanding out into the galaxy in gigantic colony ships. Slower than light speed, the ships are filled with long-lived people who are, nevertheless, in suspended animation for all or much of the voyage. One ship has reached a promising world and begun a colony, but not everyone has yet been awakened.
Matthew Fleury is shocked to learn that he has been revived from suspended animation to replace a colleague who has been murdered.
Is the planet still inhabited by the alien race that left ancient ruins of great cities? And who killed the eminent scientist leading the investigation of the ruins? If the aliens survive, then the planet becomes off limits to humans, and the ship must find another planet to colonize. There are some colonists who would kill to leave. And some who would kill to stay.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
British author and critic Stableford adds a fifth novel to his Emortality series (Inherit the Earth, etc.) with this heavily speculative tale that puts the "science" in science fiction. Expanding on the episode of humanity's first extrasolar colony from The Fountains of Youth (2000), he devises an entire biosystem based on a dual coding genome rather than Earth's sole replicator molecule, DNA. That changes everything, as the colonists learn, from reproductive strategies and lifecycles to the basic taste (mildly unpleasant) of native food. Cultural as well as scientific conflicts afflict the passengers of the colony ship Hope, whose crew members seek to expand their mission to include other stars so that they can declare the colony self-sufficient. Unfrozen from suspended animation, Matthew Fleury, an ecologist and televangelist, must solve both the mystery of a murder and the mystery of life itself down on the planet called Ararat. Weaving the two plot lines together is the suggestion that the murder was committed by intelligent humanoid natives, builders of the abandoned city in which the crime took place. After talking with every faction on ship and planet, Matt travels by boat to the unexplored great plains downriver, and the novel picks up speed as his team adventures among the native flora and the very lively fauna. Despite his reputation as "an arrogant son of a bitch" and an "egomaniac," Matt is ultimately a sympathetic hero, whose intellectual and emotional leaps of faith justify the reader's belief in him. (Mar. 27)
