Сильвен Нёвель - A History of What Comes Next

I want to thank my editor, Lee Harris, for giving my weird slightly-homicidal-alien-clone-space-race story a home. Thank you to the myriad of people at Tor.com who had a hand in making it an actual book. You all rock. On the other side of the pond, I’m grateful to be working with Jillian Taylor and the great team at Michael Joseph again for this series. Thanks to Seth Fishman, my amazing agent, and everyone at the Gernert Company. I’m extremely thankful to the real people whose lives I borrowed from for this story. I also can’t help but think of the thousands who helped send humans to space but whose names we’ll never know. The mathematicians, the engineers, the welders, the accountants, etc., etc. There are many who strived to build rockets or go to space but never achieved their goals because of funding, or politics, or because they were born in the wrong place, or with the wrong gender or skin color. We remember the von Brauns and the Gagarins and Armstrongs, but I wish we would celebrate the Mercury 13, the selected astronauts who never got to fly, all the scientists and engineers who worked on spacecraft that were never built. They all have one thing in common: they looked to the stars and dared to dream.

The Test

Sleeping Giants

Waking Gods

Only Human

SYLVAIN NEUVELhas taught linguistics in India and worked as a software engineer in Montreal. He is also a certified translator, though he wishes he were an astronaut. His girlfriend would have him believe that he has too many toys, so he writes about aliens and giant robots as a blatant excuse to build action figures (for his son, of course). His debut, Sleeping Giants , was described by NPR as “one of the most promising series kickoffs in recent memory.” You can sign up for email updates here.

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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

A HISTORY OF WHAT COMES NEXT

Copyright © 2021 by Sylvain Neuvel

All rights reserved.

Cover design by Henry Sene Yee

A Tordotcom Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates

120 Broadway

New York, NY 10271

www.tor.com

Tor ®is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.

The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

ISBN 978-1-250-26206-6 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-250-26205-9 (ebook)

eISBN 9781250262059

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First Edition: 2021

The office of the Coordinator of Information (COI) came before the OSS, but it was much smaller.

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/intelligence-history/oss

https://www.wired.com/2014/09/wernher-von-brauns-fantastic-vision-ferry-rocket/

Asif A. Siddiqi,”Challenge to Apollo: The Soviet Union and the Space Race, 1945–1974” (NASA SP-2000–4408, 2000). Part 1: https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4408pt1.pdf. Part 2: https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4408pt2.pdf.

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Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007).

Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race (New York: William Morrow, 2016).

Nathalia Holt, Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars (New York: Little, Brown, 2016).

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