Time of the Stars

The first humans to reach another star won't just cross space. They'll cross time.

In the mid-twenty-sixth century, Earth belongs to corporations, the solar system has been civilized, and humankind stands on the threshold of something no living person has ever done: travel to another star.

Commander Dante Lowell has spent his career pushing cargo through the outer solar system - a steady, decorated officer with nothing left to lose and everything to prove. When Para Space Corps selects him to command Chiron, the first crewed interstellar mission to Proxima Centauri, Dante doesn't hesitate. The stars have always been closer to him than the world below.

What no one fully prepares him for is the Lorentz Factor.

At 99% the speed of light, space time bends. For every year Dante and his crew experience crossing the 4.2 light-years to Proxima Centauri and back, Earth ages two. By the time they return, everyone they knew will be a decade older. Some won't be there at all. The mission is not just a journey across space - it is a leap into an irreversible future.

Time of the Stars follows Dante, his fifteen-person crew, and fifteen hundred colonists aboard converted asteroid habitats as they navigate not only the physics of interstellar travel but the human costs of it: sacrifice, belonging, grief, and purpose. When the mission uncovers a startling transmission buried in the archives - an old generational ship, the Aethon, launched in the Great Exodus of 2182, still on course and still carrying souls who believe Proxima Centauri b is theirs by divine right - the question of humanity's future among the stars becomes far more complicated than any mission briefing anticipated.

Hard-science precision meets deeply human storytelling in Douglas Hemme's sweeping series debut. Time of the Stars is the first volume in the Tempus Siderum series - a story about what it costs to go further than anyone has gone before, and what waits for those willing to pay it.