Thorium Blues

Worlds of Sol Book 3

ISBN: 978-1-7923-9344-0
By: Fritz, Steven

ABOUT THE BOOK

Thorium Blues After helping quell the second Martian revolution, Chris Lafontaine needs an adventure. Tharsis City needs replacement fuel for the aging power reactors that allow its farm domes to provide food and oxygen. Chris agrees to lead an expedition up Mariner Valley to the North Polar Basin to explore known thorium deposits. Leading a motley crew aboard four vacuum tractors, the only trouble Chris expects is from the hostile environment of the red planet. The trek is difficult enough, but at their goal three armed Chinese tractors block their way. Their leader tells Chris that the Peoples’ Republic claims exclusive rights to all mineral deposits in the Northern Lowlands. He orders them to leave. Chris refuses, hoping to defuse the conflict. When the Chinese tractors threaten to imprison the team, Chris realizes that the prospecting tools they brought along can also beused as weapons to defend the team. He needs to find a way to evade capture, complete his mission, and bring his crew members back to Tharsis alive.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Steven Fritz

Steven Fritz is a science fiction writer. His stories have appeared in the anthologies Unbound III - Goodbye Earth, Holiday Tales from Team Five, and the 2024 and 2025 Science Fiction Novelists SciFi Anthologies. He has published several flash and short stories in online sources such as AntipodeanSF, Flash in a Flash, and Anotherealm.org. His story November Skies appeared in Amazing Stories magazine in September 2020, and his short story Museum at the End of Time appeared in the August 2021 inaugural issue of Z-Sky magazine. He has published four novels, Fire in the Belt, Asteroid Gambit, Terraformed Earth—New Millennium, and Terraformed Earth—Discovery as well as several short stories via Kindle Direct Publishing. He has a Ph.D. in Radiation Biophysics and spent two decades as a medical school faculty member in Radiological Physics before going on to be a senior university administrator. For five years, he operated a seed-stage venture fund financed by the State of Maryland before spending another five years as an avionics entrepreneur. He also had a second career in the U. S. Naval Reserve as a Naval Aviator, which explains his continuing fascination with space travel.