First Ascent (Ascending Carbon, #1)

Orbits in ruin. A tether into space. But how much is a lie?When an unauthorized oil rig appears offshore of Ecuador, a military team is sent to investigate. The deep-water platform has no markings, no drilling rig, and no workers—but it’s surrounded by a curious bank of fog. When their helicopter closes in, it’s swallowed without a trace.

Sahalie Spark is the host of a popular TV show, Don’t Believe It! Each week, she debunks another baseless conspiracy theory or takes a light-hearted poke at misinformation infecting unfiltered media. Like most, she dismisses the story out of Ecuador as nonsense, but when a Korean billionaire offers exclusive access, Sahalie connects the dots. It’s not an oil platform, it’s a tether into space, and it could be the solution to the debris catastrophe that has crippled spaceflight for years.

Questions remain, answers are elusive, and danger lurks along this vertical railway. With the world watching, Sahalie will need to climb ever higher to discover the truth or die trying.

From the author of the Quantum Series comes an exciting new novel framed in real science that takes readers on a journey of discovery through the back doors of reality.

Note to The Ascending Carbon Series isn’t like a lot of the modern sci-fi you’ve struggled through. Here, there are no alien wars, no dystopian futures, no horror or gratuitous cruelty, and no gruesome scenes disguised as “action”. This is science fiction as it used to be—an exotic treat for the mind that takes readers on an adventure of what could be, with a positive outlook for the future of humanity. In a word, fun!