When the Solar Flare took out the world’s power… …nobody could explain why the street lights still glowed in Jakarta. Was it a signal from space? When the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) transmits strange images of the Red a scientifically unexplained light phenomenon on the summit of Elysium Mons has the experts both concerned and baffled. A team needed to check it out. The mission to Mars was set. Now, they had to build the team. Dr. Rachel Fereira, a world-renowned linguist, enjoyed her life as a professor at Stanford University. Her bestseller about how a possible first contact with intelligent life might go brought her a small amount of fame, but she didn’t expect a call from NASA. What were they keeping from the public? Was she ready for space?
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.
