A novel of the red planet from the Hugo and Nebula Award winning author of The Accidental Time Machine and Old Twentieth. Young Carmen Dula and her family are about to embark on the adventure of a lifetime, they're going to Mars. Once on the Red Planet, however, Carmen realizes things are not so different from Earth. There are chores to do, lessons to learn, and oppressive authority figures to rebel against. And when she ventures out into the bleak Mars landscape alone one night, a simple accident leads her to the edge of death until she is saved by an angel, an angel with too many arms and legs, a head that looks like a potato gone bad, and a message for the newly arrived human inhabitants of Mars: We were here first.

Carmen Dula and her husband spent six years travelling to the distant home of the powerful race known as "The Others," in the hopes of forging a truce. But by the time Carmen returns to Earth, fifty years have passed-and the Earthlings have built a flotilla of warships to defend Earth against The Others. But The Others have more power than anyone could imagine-and they will brook no insolence from the upstart human race.

"One of science fiction's most reliable practitioners" ( San Francisco Chronicle ) continues his saga of space exploration. The mysterious alien Others have prohibited humans from space travel-destroying Earth's fleet of starships in a display of unimaginable power. Now Carmen Dula, the first human to encounter Martians and then the mysterious Others, and her colleagues struggle to find a way, using nineteenthcentury technology, to reclaim the future that has been stolen from them.