Alastair Mayer’s T-Space Blog

The return to Alpha Centauri is coming. Or, rather, Alpha Centauri: The Return (book 3 of the series) should be available from your favorite Kindle store next week.

Due to a few last-minute production issues, it won’t make the hoped-for July 20th (anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing) release day. Sorry about that. Current target is now July 24th, which is the day the Apollo 11 crew returned to Earth. Maybe that’s a more appropriate anniversary anyway.

(The cover is not quite final. One of those last-minute production issues. But this is close.)

To quickly recap, Alpha Centauri Book 1, First Landing details the first mission to Alpha Centauri (which I guess is somewhat obvious from the title, grin). At the end of that, the mission forks. One crew elects to stay behind to explore the second Earth-like planet, while the rest come back to Earth to report their findings. The time-lines for Books 2 and 3 are in parallel, with Sawyer’s World set in the Alpha Centauri system, and this latest, The Return, following as Drake’s crew returns to Earth, find some interesting things in the returned specimens, and work to get another mission back to Alpha Centauri to retrieve Sawyer’s crew. Oh, and remember the Chinese from Book 1? We find out more about that in The Return also.

If you’re on my mailing list, I’ll be sending you a free short story, “Shake Up”, which is a bit of a sidebar to the series, explaining some off-scene events alluded to in the latest book. (If you’d like to sign up, you can do that here: subscribe)

The trade paperback version of Alpha Centauri: The Return will be available a little later, but within a couple of weeks.

Cheers!