The Eternal Flame: Orthogonal Book Two - Softcover

The generation ship the 'Peerless' is suffering from a population explosion, and the only way to reduce the number of children is by drastically limiting the females' food intake. So population control consists of two barbaric choices: starvation, or suicide.

Trying to find a better way, a biologist starts experimenting with animals, and stumbles on a technique that radically alters the reproductive cycle. But while the advantages are obvious, there's a major drawback: while it spares women from their old role - reproduction without hope of survival - it will essentially wipe out an entire sex.

Amid the turmoil created by this new possibility, physicists on the ship are working to develop the technology they will need to complete the mission of the 'Peerless'. One of the expedition's founders dreamed of discovering the Eternal Flame: a way to generate thrust without consuming any fuel at all.

The inhabitants on board the 'Peerless' have some hard choices to make -- and the wrong one could spell extinction for their entire race!

The generation ship Peerless has set out on a mission to discover the technology needed to save its home world from annihilation. But the Peerless is facing urgent problems of its own. It does not carry enough fuel to return home, so without a new form of propulsion the explorers will remain stranded in space.

A population explosion has stretched the ship's life support capacity to its limits, and the biology of the travellers offers only the harshest way to prevent further growth: subjecting the women to famine conditions in a drastic attempt to limit the number of children they bear.

When the astronomer Tamara discovers the Object - a massive meteor just within reach- hopes rise that there might finally be a solution to the fuel crisis. As an expedition is organised to explore the Object, a biologist struggles to devise a better way to control fertility, while his partner stumbles on a strange phenomenon that challenges everything she thought she knew about light.

As the three scientists clash with the leaders of the Peerless and the traditions and prejudices of their society, they find themselves swept up in two equally dangerous revolutions: one in their understanding of matter and energy, the other in the radically different roles imposed by their species on women and men. Either change may destroy the ship - together, they might save their world.

The Eternal Flame is the second volume of the Orthogonal trilogy, continuing the story of the Peerless that began with The Clockwork Rocket.

'Clockwork Rocket is the perfect sf novel' Liviu Suciu, Fantasy Book Critic

"[A] hugely ambitious novel ... full of interesting characters with real desires, hopes and flaws, while the plot is multi-layered, complex and gripping." Patrick Mahon, SFCrowsNest.com

[Cover of Clockwork Rocket]

Orthogonal Book 1

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