First published 2006
Tyler Dupree is ten years old when he stands in his backyard and witnesses every star in the sky flare bright and disappear. A black barrier now surrounds Earth, blocking out the cosmos. The sun has become a featureless disk. The moon is gone. Satellites have crashed, their wreckage mysteriously aged as if they had orbited for millennia. Tyler grows up alongside his friends Jason and Diane Lawton, all shaped by this event called the Big Blackout. Scientists discover the barrier is artificial, created by alien technology. Time moves faster outside than inside. More than a hundred million years pass each day beyond the barrier. Earth has roughly forty years before the sun dies. Jason becomes a scientist fighting this creeping apocalypse. Diane marries a cult leader who builds a religion around humanity's fears. Earth terraforms Mars and sends colonists who return as emissaries with thousands of years of Martian stories. When Mars gets its own barrier, Jason releases self-replicating probes into space to discover what lies beyond.
Genres: science-fiction, dystopia, speculative-fiction, thriller
Vibes: atmospheric, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: apocalypse, first-contact
Setting: Earth, Mars
Period: 21st-century
458 pages · Mass Market Paperback · Tor Science Fiction