Book description
High Crimes Call for High Punishment. It is the twenty-first century.
Convicts are sentenced to asteroids that move in ever-widening solar
orbits, timed to return when their terms run out. But a few ambitious
administrators discover that small "errors" in velocity can
rid them of selected groups altogether: the hardcore violent, the
mentally defective, and especially the political dissidents. Enduring
the black vise of interstellar space-time, these human rejects--men and
women mixed together--create their own Darwinian societies, struggling
to survive. Back on Earth, a handful of sympathetic and curious
scientists have not forgotten these lost citizens. When a technological
breakthrough makes it possible to overtake these scattered asteroids, a
courageous team sets out to go where none has willingly gone before.
What they discover in these "brute orbits" is both provocative
and moving--a startling vision of humanity you will never forget. Winner
of the John W. Campbell Award for best novel, 1999 George Zebrowskis
nearly forty books include novels, short fiction collections,
anthologies, and a book of essays. Science fiction writer Greg Bear
calls him one of those rare speculators who bases his dreams on science
as well as inspiration, and the late Terry Carr, one of the most
influential science fiction editors of recent years, described him as an
authority in the SF field. Zebrowski has published more than seventy
works of short fiction and more than a hundred and forty articles and
essays, and has written about science for Omni Magazine. His short
fiction and essays have appeared in Amazing Stories, The Magazine of
Fantasy & Science Fiction, Science Fiction Age, Nature, the Bertrand
Russell Society News, and many other publications.
