The Rock Rats [Paperback]

Visionary space industrialist Dan Randolph is dead-but his prot?g?, pilot Pancho Barnes, now sits on the board of his conglomerate. She has her work cut out for her. For Randolph's rival, Martin Humphries, still wants to control Astro and still wants to drive independent asteroid miners like Lars Fuchs out of business. Humphries wants revenge against Pancho-and, most of all, he wants his old flame, Amanda, who has become Lars Fuchs's wife.

Brimming with memorable characters and human conflict, rugged high-tech prospectors and boardroom betrayals, The Rock Rats continues the tale of our near-future struggle over the incalculable wealth of the Asteroid Belt, the richest source of raw mineral wealth known to humankind. Before it ends, many will die-and many will achieve more than they ever dreamed was possible.

Born in Philadelphia,Ben Bovaworked as a newspaper reporter, a technical editor for Project Vanguard (the first American satellite program), and a science writer and marketing manager for Avco Everett Research Laboratory, before being appointed editor ofAnalog, one of the leading science fiction magazines, in 1971. After leavingAnalogin 1978, he continued his editorial work in science fiction, serving as fiction editor ofOmnifor several years and editing a number of anthologies and lines of books, including the Ben Bova Presents series for Tor. He has won science fiction's Hugo Award for Best Editor six times.

A published SF author from the late 1950s onward, Bova is one of the field's leading writers of hard SF, science fiction based on plausible science and engineering. Among his dozens of novels areMillennium, The Kinsman Saga, Colony, Orion, Peacekeepers, Privateers,and theVoyagersseries. Much of his recent work, includingMars, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, The Precipice,andThe Rock Rats, falls into the continuity he calls The Grand Tour, a large-scale saga of the near-future explorlC=