Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission—and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish. Except that right now, he doesn’t know that. He can’t even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it.
All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a very, very long time. And he’s just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company.
His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, Ryland realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Hurtling through space on this tiny ship, it’s up to him to puzzle out an impossible scientific mystery—and conquer an extinction-level threat to our species.
And with the clock ticking down and the nearest human being light-years away, he’s got to do it all alone.
Or does he?
When Ryland Grace wakes up from a coma, with a bunch of tubes sticking out of him (including that spot where the sun don’t shine), he realizes that he has no memory of what happened — and eventually, through a bit of complicated science, realizes and remembers that he’s the sole survivor of a mission that’s the last ditch chance to save Earth from a star-eating microbe (“Evolution can be insanely effective when you leave it alone for a few billion years.”). For life that needs the output of the Sun it’s not good news.
I wont say more if anyone reading this doesn’t want spoilers. But I have to say, this book is such a delight to read; I cannot recommend it enough.