In the 25th Century, the effects of overpopulation and global
warming on Earth have led to the formation of human colonies on the
Moon, Mars and elsewhere in the Solar System, yet the limited number of
viable places forces humanity to look to the stars. A crash program has
been developed to send Protos 1, a giant multigenerational star ship,
to a newly discovered Earth-like planet orbiting a nearby star. The plan
is for awake crewmembers to run the ship and for people in suspended
animation to be roused before planet fall to use their skills in
exploration and colony formation. To fulfill the goals of the mission
and ensure that the in-flight population does not deplete the limited
resources, the Protos Mandate is set up to govern a tightly controlled
social system for the duration of the journey, which will take several
generations. But problems threaten to sabotage the mission during its
launch and transit and what finally awaits the crewmembers shocks them
in an unpredictable way. This novel chronicles the trials and
tribulations of this epic first interstellar mission.The scientific
appendix at the end of the book discusses the challenges of such an
interstellar mission based on an extensive literature review and it
links these challenges to specific episodes in the novel. Issues that
are considered include interstellar propulsion systems, economic
considerations of interstellar flight, psychological and sociological
factors inherent in a multigenerational space mission, problems with
suspended animation, current knowledge of exoplanets and issues related
to colonizing a distant planet and the possible discovery of
extraterrestrial life. A history of interstellar missions in science
fiction is also reviewed.Nick Kanas is an Emeritus Professor of
Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, where he
directed the group therapy training program. For over 20 years he
conducted research on group therapy, and for nearly 20 years after that
he was the Principal Investigator of NASA-funded research on astronauts
and cosmonauts. He is the co-author of Space Psychology and
Psychiatry, which won the 2004 International Academy of Astronautics
Life Science Book Award, and the author of Humans in Space: The
Psychological Hurdles, which won the 2016 International Academy of
Astronautics Life Science Book Award.
Dr. Kanas has presented talks on space psychology and on celestial
mapping at several regional and Worldcon science fiction conventions. A
Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society (London), he has been an
amateur astronomer for over 50 years and is an avid reader of science
fiction. He is also the author of two non-fiction books (Star Maps:
History, Artistry, and Cartography and Solar System Maps: From
Antiquity to the Space Age) and two science fiction novels (The New
Martians andThe Protos Mandate*), all published by Springer.*
