Showing results for "The Will" in Hard Science Fiction

As startling and provocative as his famous Stranger in a Strange Land, here is Heinlein’s grand masterpiece about a man supremely talented, immensely old, and obscenely wealthy who discovers that money can buy everything.

He's provided for each of them the opportunity to lead a life of health, wealth, and power far beyond their imagination. By his own example, he's shown them that such gifts are meant to be shared, used to make the world a better place. And he's never asked them for anything in return, showing a willingness to risk even his own life to live to his own ideals. Now Will Stark needs their help. He's helpless, he's uneducated, and he's about to meet men who can utterly destroy him. And they'll need to make sure that's exactly what happens.

In the bustling port of Alvarado, fortunes are made, smuggled, and stolen every day. For John Donovan and his crew, it's supposed to be a quick-and-dirty job: deliver a load of cloned cattle, collect the credits, and move on to the next job. But Alvarado doesn't do "quick." Not when two rival families are locked in a blood feud over control of the port. Not when every barfight could turn into a gunfight. And definitely not when Donovan finds himself caught between loyalty, business—and the wrong woman.

Wrimmad City, the largest settlement on the remote island of Botzis, is in many ways a low technology backwater fishing village, but for one detail: it boasts the seat of Unitism, the world’s second-largest religious order. Polister Calidon, the leader of that order, has lived a politically complicated but otherwise decently tranquil existence, up until the day an old friend shows up at his door. The friend, Professor Damid Magly, and his companion, Princess Battine Alconnot, are fleeing an international warrant, and demand sanctuary.

Captain Graciela is where she wants to be, far from her controlling mother, in a rented solar sail cargo ship, trading and gambling throughout the heliosphere. It can be lonely in the void, but the crew on the H2LiftShip, the LunaCola, is all the help she needs: Jack, a talking dog with a nose for Earth jerky, Tang, a poker-obsessed orangutan, and Octopus, in his watery navigation station, are her constant companions on her journey.

Four students discover a manuscript, The Book of Skulls, which reveals the existence of a sect, now living in the Arizona desert, whose members can offer immortality to those who can complete its initiation rite. To their surprise, they discover that the sect exists, and is willing to accept them as acolytes. But for each group of four who enter the rite, two must die in order for the others to succeed.

John Donovan is a Frontiersman: smuggler, pilot, and professional debtor. He'll haul anything for the right price—cargo, cattle, fugitives, even a preacher with secrets too big to pray away. When a desperate job takes him through the forbidden space of the warlike Peko, Donovan figures it's just another high-risk run. Between hostile aliens, scavenger pirates, and a haunted luxury cruiser adrift in the void, Donovan and his mismatched crew are in for the ride of their lives.