The Earth Run
A farmhand, a thousand-year-old starship, and the long way home.
Jake Reilly is a Kansas farmhand who fixes what's in front of him. One August night he walks toward a strange light in a soybean field — not from bravery, from curiosity about a pump — and wakes up on a survey ship from a colony that left Earth a thousand years ago.
A stowaway on a ship a thousand years from home.
The night a survey ship from a thousand-year-old human colony touches down in the east section, Jake walks toward the light because the pump sounds wrong. By the time the hatch seals, he's a stowaway on a starship already bound for home — and home, for the crew, is a world Earth lost track of before the Norman Conquest.
For readers of Andy Weir's The Martian and Project Hail Mary — propulsive, science-literate, and quietly in love with people who are good with their hands.
More about the book →Writing grief without naming it
On the rule that the narrator isn't allowed to name the feeling — and what a kettle can do instead.
Writing a narrator who doesn't know
On point of view, attention, and the gap between what Jake sees and what the reader does.
A thousand years of impossibility
On the puzzle at the bottom of the book, and why the novel doesn't solve it.