A Long Way Back: Alone Above A Broken Earth

The world ended not in a single flash, but in exhaustion. Cities lie in radioactive ruin, knowledge is scattered like ash, and a small fortified settlement clings to survival with one desperate plan: revive an eighteen-year-old satellite designed to beam solar power back to Earth. Only one man can reach it.

Thomas H. Morris is not an engineer. He is a historian. Chosen because he is expendable, conditioned through hypnosis to perform work he does not consciously understand, and launched alone into orbit, Tom must assemble five drifting satellite modules before his oxygen runs out and before the cold of space seeps through his failing ship. Below him waits a community that sees the satellite as salvation. Tom sees something more complicated. As he labors through freezing darkness, he begins to understand that the true struggle is not against space, but against fear—the fear of reopening the shattered cities and the knowledge buried inside them.

A Long Way Back is not simply a story about survival in orbit. It is a tense, intimate confrontation between one man and the future he is being asked to secure. With time slipping away and a final adjustment left to make, Tom must decide whether he will follow orders—or force humanity onto a harder, riskier path toward rebuilding itself.

Ben Bova would go on to become one of science fiction’s most influential editors and novelists. As editor of Analog Science Fiction and Fact from 1972 to 1978, he helped shape a generation of writers and ideas in hard science fiction. He later won six Hugo Awards for Best Professional Editor and wrote more than 120 books, including the long-running Grand Tour series such as Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. His fiction often grapples with humanity’s relationship to technology and the moral choices that accompany progress.