At a much younger age I had read a lot of Heinlein, Asimov and Joe Haldeman. The other day I picked up a used copy of one of his books from the shelf of one of my used bookstores, titled World’s Apart from 1983. I knew if I had read it it had been long enough not to be fresh in my memory.

It didn’t take long for me to remember that Joe’s style of writing was quite harsh and very graphic for the time and my young age, but the story seemed a new one to me.

I recently finished reading Terry Goodkind’s Pillars of Creation. Although it is not my favorite work of his, I still found the mystery he builds during the first few chapters my favorite part of this book.

I remember the first time I knew I was hooked on the drama of space travel. I was sitting at a wood picnic table on the bench seat with my father, mother, brother and assorted pets in the backyard of our home in Cave Creek, Arizona waiting for the televised first steps of man on the surface of the moon..

An Excepted Short Story Based On The Novel The Charon Covenant

“My darling Dara,
Don’t show this letter to anyone. I want you to know the true history of what happened and how we all became so mindless, so docile that we lost our ability to defend ourselves because the time is coming that you will need to.
The Earth, as we knew it, had been nearly unlivable for over two decades. The world where trees, wildlife and flowers once blossomed under the warm sunshine had withered, veiled in a dark gaseous cloud. Even as the end neared, people buried their heads in the sand, always expecting someone else to solve the problem. As food supplies waned, tensions between countries grew while hundreds of thousands of people starved in every country across the globe. Even neighbors began to distrust neighbors; people were hording food in an attempt to ward off the inevitable.
Without warning, came the Great War of Nations. Then, without warning, came the Great War of Nations. The war ended abruptly two years later, not because some peaceful means of resolution had been established, but for lack of resources.