On the International Space Station... ...an unthinkable disaster occurs. Was it an accident? ESA astronaut Thomas Ehrmann and NASA astronaut Patricia Michaels escape in a Soyuz capsule. The Russian authorities in Kazakhstan have questions and want to know what happened to the third member of the crew, Oleg Rashkin. They both refuse to talk. What are they hiding? Amina Young is a psychologist with the ESA. In her mid-thirties, she's specialized in and advanced the field of psychological analysis of astronauts. If anyone can get to the facts about the incidents that happened on the mission, it's her. The first contradiction of Ehrmann and Michaels' stories starts Amina down a path she's not prepared for. Was the Pentagon involved? Is the Earth's future in peril? Always realistic and meticulously researched in the environment of the European Space Agency. Many of the incidents described in the book actually happened and are woven together here into a gripping space thriller. For the research for this novel, Joshua personally spoke to active astronauts, former space shuttle pilots and carried out two parabolic flights with Novespace and ESA personnel in order to experience real weightlessness on his own body. Anyone who has always wanted to find out how international space travel works and is organized, what life is like on the ISS, and how it is intertwined with politics will find the right book here.
Author
Joshua T. Calvert has traveled the world—on foot, by Jeep, by bicycle, by motorcycle, and lots of other ways besides. As you might imagine, he's seen many things most people never see - including an Iranian prison cell, from the inside! In Kyrgyzstan, he fared slightly better, narrowly avoiding being kidnapped for ransom. Skydiver, scuba diver, martial artist, adventurer - his goal is to experience everything possible, and then make it real to you in his books. And he's made a good run of it so far: in the Philippines, he did police training on multiple types of firearms (despite being no fan of guns himself); dove in Asian waters among sharks and shipwrecks; and patrolled with Sumatran jungle rangers. That's what defines Calvert's approach to method writing: pushing himself beyond his own limits, to experience first-hand what his characters experience, to make your immersion in his stories as deep as it can be. For Ganymede Rises, after a slight detour with some smugglers in the deserts of Uzbekistan and the steppes of Mongolia, he traveled by dogsled and snowshoe to the Arctic Circle to experience first-hand what it's like to be utterly isolated in the coldest place on Earth. For his book The Fossil, he sat with professional pilots in flight simulators for Airbus A320 and Boeing 737 aircraft to learn what it's like to fly a passenger jet. His latest adventure: a parabolic flight with European Space Agency astronauts, to experience zero-gravity. All so he can describe it to you, in his own words.
