商品簡介
Now in a Tor Essentials edition, a Hugo-winning novel of breathtaking cosmic scope―and the very human people who must live through it.
Tor Essentials presents new editions of science fiction and fantasy titles of proven merit and lasting value, each volume introduced by an appropriate literary figure.
One night, when he was twelve, Tyler Dupree stood in his back yard and watched the stars go out. They all flared into brilliance at once, then disappeared, replaced by a flat, empty black barrier. He and his best friends, Jason and Diane Lawton, had seen what became known as the Big Blackout. It would shape their lives.
Eventually, probes reveal that the barrier is artificial, generated by huge alien artifacts. Time is passing faster outside the barrier―more than a hundred million years per year on Earth. At this rate, the death of the Sun is only forty years away.
Now a promising young scientist, Jason works to avert this apocalypse. Diane marries a cult leader who's forged a religion out of the fears of millions. Earth sends terraforming machines, then humans, to Mars . . . and in an eyeblink, a wizened ancient Martian human returns with thousands of years' tales about the settling of Mars. Then an identical barrier appears around Mars.
Life on Earth is about to get much, much stranger.
With a new introduction by John Scalzi, New York Times-bestselling and Hugo-winning author of Old Man's War, Redshirts, and many other popular works of SF.
