Terra Autovictus — George W. Harper

When QUIZZER set out on her epic journey some 18 years earlier she was manned by a crew of six. Returning was a crew of nine; three of them being their now teenaged children who were produced along the way. On their return the children were sent to a specialized school exclusively designed for children raised in unusual alien environments. Two of the six remaining were assigned to other duty and four were further separated with orders to go their individual ways and devote an entire year to studying Earth as if it were an alien world. They were not to contact one another but at the end of the year they were to report their findings and give their conclusions. Heam, a Cambodian born and raised in the tropics, wound up in the high arctic around Norway, while Kunella began in Kampuchea but finished in Boston and ultimately in Baghdad. Jeremy cruised North America and Doc wound up in China. Their discoveries and conclusions were vastly different than the ‘feel good' fantasy imitation science fiction leads us to imagine. The novel continues to conform to my announced goal of producing a logically coherent depiction of the universe as it might be given the physics adopted so the conclusions may come as surprises but follow as a rational consequence of the tales thus far.