
Humanity has taken its first daring steps beyond Earth, sending ships to distant worlds and planting the seeds of new civilizations across the galaxy. In this sweeping vision of the future, a corps of colonial survey officers maps uncharted planets, turning hostile terrains into footholds for humanity’s expansion. The story follows one such officer, whose skill and determination become the backbone of the colonization effort.
Bordman, fresh from years of apprenticeship on tropical and volcanic colonies, now faces his inaugural independent mission on Lani III, a frigid world whose icy valleys and towering, sun‑spotted peaks defy all his prior training. As he awakens to a bone‑cold cabin and an unsettling loss of contact with the home base, he must balance the rigors of scientific precision with the raw challenges of survival in a hostile environment. His resolve and ingenuity set the stage for the daring feats that will shape humanity’s foothold among the stars.
Language
en
Duration
~6 hours (366K characters)
Publisher of text edition
Project Gutenberg
Original publisher
United States: Avon Publications, Inc.,1956,copyright 1957.
Credits
Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
Release date
2022-12-13
Rights
Public domain in the USA.

1896–1975
Best known for brisk, idea-packed science fiction, this prolific American storyteller helped shape classic genre themes long before many of them became standard. Writing under a pen name, he produced an enormous body of fiction and is still remembered for influential stories such as "First Contact" and "Sidewise in Time."
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