Second Star

Earth's first space colony is overrun by spacepirates, politicians and saboteurs. One person dedicates her life to keeping her beloved colony safe: Esther "Star" Svensdotter. She's dealt with all kinds of human troublemakers, but the rules change when the colony receives its first contact from aliens.
"THE FIRST SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL I ever read was Robert A. Heinlein’s Between Planets. It was the only Heinlein novel local librarian Susan Bloch English had in the Seldovia Public Library’s collection. I was in my twenties before I discovered he had written a bunch of juvenile novels for serialization in Boy’s Life magazine, which explained all the Boy Scouts in the books. I loved Between Planets. Long before Wookiees appeared on the Lucasian horizon I wanted to meet a move-over, which probably explains my lifelong fascination with and support for the space program. The first live television I saw was the landing on the moon in 1969, and about as enraged as I’ve ever been was when Richard Feynman used a piece of rubber and a glass of ice water to demonstrate what happened to the Challenger. I will never completely understand why NASA management didn’t listen to those two Morton Thiokol engineers and cancel the launch. I never thought I’d write science fiction because I never thought I was smart enough. It was Heinlein who said it: “Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human.” I can’t and I’m not, not by his definition, but rage is a great motivator, and after Challenger I sat down to write a book about a space program that worked. The result was Second Star. I looked everything up four and five times and I still got plenty wrong, but most of the ideas herein were first thought of by people who are fully human, who can do the math."