Squee

About the book

The men aboard a cramped spaceship have spent years sharing stale air, inadequate food, and rising irritation. Their voyage is organized around the research of Thomas Neil, whose father helped unleash a weapon that destroyed humanity's future by killing its women. Neil's experiments may offer a way to continue the species, but the crew distrusts both the scientist and the inheritance he represents. Their mechanical survival depends on cooperation; their larger predicament demands a judgment about what people may do in the name of victory or preservation. Margaret St. Clair combines shipboard tensions with a bleak speculative account of reproductive catastrophe, making the search for a technical remedy inseparable from the moral failure that made it necessary.

• Biological warfare
• Survival and responsibility
• Trust under pressure

Why read it

Read a stark spaceflight story in which scientific rescue cannot be separated from the ethics of its use.

English science-fiction story by Margaret St. Clair