Jupiter Project

The Jovian Astronautical-Biological Orbital Laboratory circles Jupiter and its moons--a metal shell bathed in lethal radiation, held in tenuous place by the gravity of the massive gas giant like a fragile glass ornament in a monstrous fist.

For seventeen-year-old Matt Bohles and his friends, "the Can" is home.

Life onboard the aging space station is cramped, spartan, and dangerous. Its mission--to monitor incoming signals and transmissions in search of alien life--has so far proven fruitless.

It is the only world Matt has ever known.

But now, as the threshold of adulthood--with its onset of new questions, confusions and feelings --Matt Bohles faces an impending crisis that threatens everything he knows and is. For unless he can prove himself an invaluable member of the scientific team--and quickly--he will be exiled to a filthy, perilous and unfamiliar hell called Earth.

Gregory Benford is a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine. He is a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, and was Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University. His research encompasses both theory and experiments in the fields of astrophysics and plasma physics. His fiction has won many awards, including the Nebula Award for his novel Timescape. Dr. Benford makes his home in Laguna Beach, California.