Star Pyramid: Chronicles of the Concordat Book One
About this ebook
The modern one was the same.
In the mid 2100s, Earth is in decline. Colonies and mining around distant stars are needed to deal with resource shortages and population growth. But those require faster-than-light travel. A Nobel-winning physicist and a maverick mathematician have argued that FTL travel is a theoretical possibility, but only by using the mysterious superheavy element 126, ‘mahabhavium’. It is being created atom by atom in vast accelerators, but not in useful quantities.
Everything changes when mahabhavium is discovered spectroscopically in gas clouds surrounding a neutron star 400 light years away. The Star Pyramid project is born. A pyramid-shaped starship travelling just below the speed of light, Star Pyramid can reach the gas clouds in around 400 years – 98 years from the perspective of the crew, who will spend most of the trip in suspended animation anyway. It will harvest mahabhavium and use a small fraction to return to Earth immediately.
A massive concerted global effort provides the resources needed for Star Pyramid to launch in 2169, but not without critics on Earth and potential saboteurs on board.
What could possibly go wrong?
Another thought-provoking science fiction tour-de-force from Ian Stewart, in an innovative documentary-style narrated by various of the main characters involved.
About the author
Ian Stewart is Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick and a Fellow of the Royal Society. He has six honorary doctorates and is an honorary wizard of Unseen University. His more than 130 books include Professor Stewart’s Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities and the four-volume series The Science of Discworld with Terry Pratchett and Jack Cohen. His SF novels include the trilogy Wheelers, Heaven, and Oracle (with Jack Cohen), The Living Labyrinth and Rock Star (with Tim Poston), and Jack of All Trades. Short story collections are Message from Earth and Pasts, Presents, Futures. His Flatland sequel Flatterland has extensive fantasy elements. He has published 33 short stories in Analog, Omni, Interzone, and Nature, with 10 stories in Nature’s ‘Futures’ series. He was Guest of Honour at Novacon 29 in 1999 and Science Guest of Honour and Hugo Award Presenter at Worldcon 75 in Helsinki in 2017. He delivered the 1997 Christmas Lectures for BBC television. His awards include the Royal Society’s Faraday Medal, the Gold Medal of the IMA, the Zeeman Medal, the Lewis Thomas Prize, the Euler Book Prize, the Premio Internazionale Cosmos, the Chancellor’s Medal of the University of Warwick, and the Bloody Stupid Johnson Award for Innovative Uses of Mathematics.
