Brute Orbits

George Zebrowski

Dec 2011 · Hachette UK

About this ebook

High Crimes Call for High Punishment. It is the twenty-first century. Convicts are sentenced to asteroids that move in ever-widening solar orbits, timed to return when their terms run out. But a few ambitious administrators discover that small "errors" in velocity can rid them of selected groups altogether: the hardcore violent, the mentally defective, and especially the political dissidents. Enduring the black vise of interstellar space-time, these human rejects - men and women mixed together - create their own Darwinian societies, struggling to survive.

Back on Earth, a handful of sympathetic and curious scientists have not forgotten these lost citizens. When a technological breakthrough makes it possible to overtake these scattered asteroids, a courageous team sets out to go where none has willingly gone before. What they discover in these "brute orbits" is both provocative and moving - a startling vision of humanity you will never forget.

Winner of the John W. Campbell Award for best novel, 1999

About the author

George Zebrowski (1945 - )
George Zebrowski was born in Austria in 1945. Fellow science fiction writer Greg Bear calls him one of those rare speculators who bases his dreams on science as well as inspiration, and the late Terry Carr - one of the science fiction field's most influential editors - described him as an authority in the SF field. Zebrowski has published more than seventy works of short fiction and more than a hundred and forty articles and essays, and has written about science for Omni Magazine. His short fiction and essays have appeared in Amazing Stories, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Science Fiction Age, Nature, the Bertrand Russell Society News and many other publications. Winner of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1999 for his novel Brute Orbits, George Zebrowski lives with author Pamela Sargent, with whom he has co-written a number of novels.