Mike's academic research turns into an exotic nautical adventure unlike anything he could have imagined.ĭiscover MESKLIN - Gravity: 3g at the equator, 700g at the poles! Out on the great planetary ocean, self-sufficiency is crucial, and far from any floating city, on a small working-family ship, anything can happen. The atmosphere isn't breathable, and lightning, waterspouts, and tsunamis are constant. The population is scattered in cities on floating artificial islands with no fixed locations. The ocean is 1,700 miles deep, with no solid ground anywhere. Although settled by Polynesians, it is anything but a tropical paradise. Mike Hoani has come there to study the language of the colonists, to analyze its evolution in the years since settlement. Kainui is one of a pair of double planets circling a pair of binary stars. It is the kind of story that made his reputation as a meticulous designer of otherworldly settings that are utterly convincing because they are constructed from the ground up using established principles of orbital mechanics, geology, chemistry, biology, and other sciences. Hal Clement, the dean of hard science fiction, has written a new planetary adventure in the tradition of his classic Mission of Gravity. Has someone sent them a fully preserved fossil, a long-buried ancestor of the present-day Habras? Or is this an elaborate hoax being staged to put an end to their study before they can unearth the truth about the planet and its people? And when a ground vehicle turns up at the research settlement with no one aboard except a long-dead Habra frozen in a block of ice, humans Hugh and Janice Cedar and their allies among the Six Races are determined to get to the root of this mystery. But there are those among the Six Races who seem to have secret agendas of their own. Their mission is to search through the planet's ice layers for fossils which they hope will determine whether the winged natives, the Habras, actually evolved there or are-as some evidence indicates-descendants of the long-vanished, legendary Seventh Race.
Set in a niverse created by Isaac Asimov and written by science fiction master Hal CLement, this is the story of six vastly different star faring races struggling to coexist as they combine their forces for a scientific project on the inhospitable world of Habranha.
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