Ground: A Deadly Puzzle in Alien Skies

Four men travel where almost no spacecraft has ever dared to go—skimming the outer atmosphere of the red giant VV Cephei. Their research vessel Wraith carries a revolutionary cooling system designed to keep the ship alive in the unimaginable heat. Everything works perfectly... until another ship appears.

Suzeraintist extremists have tracked the mission across interstellar space. They seize the Wraith, steal its experimental refrigeration system, and sabotage the vessel before leaving the crew to cook inside the star’s atmosphere. With their drive destroyed and the temperature climbing, the men have only hours to stop the pirates from escaping with the technology.

Their only remaining tool is a mass spectrograph mounted outside the hull. It was never meant to be a weapon. But in this unusual star system, a scientific instrument might unleash forces no one anticipated.

Ground by Hal Clement delivers a tense battle of physics and ingenuity in one of the most hostile environments imaginable. Scientists and a quick-thinking pilot must turn what remains aboard their crippled ship into a desperate counterattack.

Hal Clement—born Harry Clement Stubbs in 1922—was one of science fiction’s leading champions of scientific realism. A Harvard-trained chemist and longtime science teacher, Clement built his stories around real physics and astronomy. His most famous novel, Mission of Gravity (1954), remains a landmark of hard science fiction and introduced readers to Mesklin, a world of extraordinary gravity.

Clement published widely in Astounding Science Fiction, where editor John W. Campbell encouraged technically rigorous stories. Ground reflects Clement’s signature approach: when brute force fails, understanding the universe may offer another way out.