Publisher's Synopsis
THE CAMPBELL AWARD WINNING NOVEL. The reluctant revolutionary! Charles Cantrell thought he had enough headaches as project manager of a crew building a habitat on the asteroid, Rosinante. Then some dunderheaded politician back on Earth shipped several thousand perfectly innocent political prisoners to Rosinante to escape embarrassment. Suddenly, Charles found the habitat transformed from an engineering project to a colony - and he was in charge! Every one of the new arrivals had an axe to grind, and Charles seemed to be the whetstone they liked to grind their blades on. Then Earth decided it wanted several of the prisoners back, and Charles refused to surrender them. Now Earth's space navy is on its way to seize control of the asteroid. To preserve his own freedom, and that of everyone now on Rosinante, Charles is forced to turn revolutionary. But how can one small group stranded on a tiny worldlet billions of miles from anywhere possibly resist the military might of Terra? "Big engineering, and the right people in the right place, trump political turmoil, economic collapse, and sinister political agendas. Add Independence, big science [and] tons of ill-gotten booty ... will make you believe that normal people with a dream can win out in the end! A feel-good story for our times." -Bear Peters. "Gilliland's quirky mix of eccentric characters, cynical power politics, and old-style engineering-in-space-hard-sf works ... fun to read. " -Dani Zweig's Reviews. First book in The Rosinante Trilogy. Alexis A. Gilliland is a science fiction and fantasy writer, as well as a fan cartoonist highly regarded for an acerbic wit. Gilliland won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer for The Revolution from Rosinante in 1982, and has won four Hugo Awards for Best Fan Artist. His other books include The End of the Empire and the Wizenbeak Trilogy.
