Hurricane Moon

In the late twenty-first century, earth is wracked by political and ecological crises, and the Aeon Foundation launches a starship to find a new world and found a new civilisation, with all the advances of science and without the mistakes made on earth. Catharin Gault is the idealistic astronaut-physician in Aeon's primary crew. Along with the rest of the crew and passenger-colonists, she goes into stasis-cold suspended animation - for the long journey across the stars, their collective fate surrendered to the ship's artificial intelligence. Things go amiss even before the new world's beginning. Programmed to search for a planet with a large moon (the only way to guarantee stable seasons, tides, and an earth-like ecosystem after terraforming), the ship takes far too long, then finds a destination better than Catharin ever dared hope for: two earth-sized planets locked in orbit around each other. The one dubbed "Planet Green" has abundant plant life and a paucity of large animals. "Planet Blue" is an oceanic world covered with hurricanes. Several things about Blue baffle Aeon's planetary scientists. To everyone else, it's simply a big, blue moon. Revived from stasis more than a thousand years after the starship left earth, Catharin makes a horrible discovery. The long stasis damaged the complex organic molecules in human bodies. Unless the human genome can be repaired, there will be no future on idyllic Planet Green. Aeon has tremendous biomedical resources, but Catharin needs more. She needs a genetic miracle-worker - and she has one. She revives Joseph Devreze: a uniquely talented molecular biologist and maddeningly irresponsible genius. A crown prince of the science of his century, Devreze made a terrible mistake, followed a seductive line of research too far, and made one powerful enemy too many. In a trap of his own unwitting making, he saw only one way out: escape to the other side of the stars. Now, Catharin must rely on this untrustworthy maverick to help her save humanity on Green. Their mutual attraction ratchets up as their conflict with each other escalates. Together Catharin and Joe must decide how they can face, and embrace, a future utterly at odds with the Foundation's plans and their own expectations. And all the while the mystery of the "Hurricane Moon" looms over them.