Prelude to Stars

Join noted hard science fiction author G. David Nordley in this new collection of his stories of the exploration of the Solar System.

FRIED
Not knowing why Jupiter's magnetic field turned off hadn't put science in a very good position to predict when and how fast it would come back on again... The quiet years might have been decades, centuries, or millennia. They turned out to be seven years, three months and twenty-two days. The end, of course, had caught everyone by surprise.
- from "Out of the Quiet Years"

MAROONED
I looked up toward the departing lander, now a blue-violet pinprick with a ghostly tail against a jet-black sky... Sam started rummaging through our rations. "The schlemiel didn't leave us with enough to survive..."
"...we aren't effing intended to survive," Kari said.
- from "Haumea"