Probability Sun

Salvation or Annihilation? A strange artifact has been discovered on a distant planet, an artifact that may be the key to humanity's salvation. For we at war with the Fallers, an alien race bent on nothing short of genocide, and this is a war we are losing. The artifact is not only a powerful weapon, but possibly the rosetta stone to a lost superscience . . . a superscience that the Fallers may have already decoded. Or it may be a doomsday machine that could destroy the very fabric of space.

Nancy Kress was born and raised in upstate New York, where she spent most of her childhood either reading or playing in the woods. She earned a bachelor's and master's degree in education, as well as an M.A. in English. While she was pregnant with the second of her two sons, she started writing fiction. She had never planned on becoming a writer, but staying at home full-time with infants left her time to experiment.

In 1990 she went full-time as an SF writer. The first thing she wrote in this new status was the novella version of Beggars In Spain, which won both the Hugo and the Nebula Award. She is the author of more than twenty books, including more than a dozen novels of science fiction and fantasy, as well as three story collections, and two books on writing. Of her most recent novels, Probability Space (Tor, 2002) won the John W. Campbell Award for Best SF novel. Her short fiction has appeared in all the usual places, garnering her one Hugo and three Nebula Awards. Her work has been translated into Swedish, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Japanese, Croatian, Lithuanian, Romanian, Greek, Hebrew, and Russian. She is also the monthly "Fiction" columnist for Writer's Digest Magazine and she teaches writing regularly at various places, including Clarion and The Writing Center in Bethesda, Maryland. She currently resides in Rochester, New York.

"Kress's always excellent characters wrestle with a splendid array of puzzles and problems, human, alien, and scientific: another resounding success for this talented sure-footed writer."-Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)

"The author grounds her morally complex plot in the physics of probability. As usual with Kress, her eccentric characters add depth. Readers will start this novel because of Kress's reputation, will read it for the adventure and will like it for the characters and the science."--Publishers Weekly

"The immediate sequel to Probability Moon. The questions that permeate the tightly paced story are whether scientists and the military can cooperate to learn the nature of the artifact--scientific storehouse or doomsday machine--and whether either of those parties will procure the cooperation of the captive Faller, whose perception of reality is unfathomably different from that of any of the humans. Displaying a typically strong synthesis of Kress' many gifts, the novel leaves the door wide open for at least one successor."--Booklist

"Kress has blended such a nice set of surprises and inevitabilities that you should learn and read and enjoy them for yourself. You don't have to read Probability Moon to have a good time, but you'll probably search it out anyway."--San Diego Union-Tribune