First published 1980
The starship Leonora Christine carries fifty crew members toward a distant planet thirty light years away. At near light speed, relativistic effects will compress their subjective journey to just a few years while decades pass in the outside universe. Then disaster strikes when an interstellar dust cloud batters the ship and destroys the deceleration systems beyond repair. The Leonora Christine continues gaining speed with no way to slow down. As the ship approaches and then exceeds light speed itself, time dilation reaches extreme proportions. The crew watches helplessly as eons flash by outside their vessel. Entire galaxies streak past their viewports while only hours or days pass aboard ship. The fifty travelers hurtle deeper into an cosmos that ages around them at an impossible rate, racing toward an uncertain fate in a universe that may no longer contain anything they once knew.
Genres: science-fiction, space, adventure, hard-science-fiction
Vibes: fast-paced, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: space-exploration, time-travel
Setting: Leonora Christine
Period: 30 Light Years
188 pages · Mass Market Paperback · Berkley