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by Allen Steele (Author)
Imagine a world without plastic.
Imagine a world where something in the environment eats plastic.
Imagine arriving on such a world in a space ship.
After traveling light years to Tau Ceti-e, these human colonists have only minutes to abandon their ships before the native plastic-eating organism turns those vessels into death traps of orbiting debris.
Now they'll have to live an 18th-century way of life with the forbearance of the not-exactly hostile-but definitely not friendly-natives.
After enough generations, they'll forget how they came to be here.
Now they have questions: Why do the native Cetans keep humanity confined to one poor island? Why do they hate and mistrust the humans? What is going on?
Private eye Jeremy Crowe finds himself caught up in the underground search for the truth, stuck on a middling rung in the modern caste system, and struggling to not make humanity's desperate situation any worse.
Fighting for his life may turn out to be the easy part.
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Cover art by Ron Miller.
Interior art by Rob Caswell.
