Half Way Home

by Hugh Howey

WE WOKE IN FIRE

Five hundred colonists have been sent across the stars to settle an alien planet. Vat-grown in a dream-like state, they are educated through simulations by an artificial intelligence and should awaken at thirty years old, fully-trained, and ready to tame the new world.

But fifteen years in, an explosion on their vessel kills most of the homesteaders and destroys the majority of their supplies. Worse yet, the sixty that awaken and escape the flames are only half-taught and possess the skills least useful for survival.

Naked and terrified, the teens stumble from their fiery baptism ill-prepared for the unfamiliar and harsh alien world around them. Though they attempt to work with the colony A.I. to build a home, tension and misery are rampant, escalating into battles for dominance.

Soon they find that their worst enemy isn’t the hostile environment, the A.I., or the blast that nearly killed them. Their greatest danger is each other.

ISBN: 9780358213246
Format: Hardcover/Trade/Ebook
Publicity Contact: Michelle Triant <michelle.triant@hmhco.com>

About the Author

Hugh Howey is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of Wool, Shift, Dust, Beacon 23, Sand, and Machine Learning. His works have been translated into more than forty languages and have sold more than three million copies worldwide. Wool is currently in development for television at AMC, and Sand is in development at Amazon. Hugh lives aboard Wayfinder, a fifty-foot catamaran that he is sailing around the world.

Praise for Half Way Home

In this cross between William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and Robert A. Heinlein’s Tunnel in the Sky, Howey (Machine Learning) creates a strange setting that’s atmospheric and alien.

—Publishers Weekly

Man versus the elements is one of the great tropes of narrative fiction, and it can be especially compelling in the realm of science fiction since the challenges that must be faced are limited only by the author’s imagination. Howey shows no lack of imagination at devising obstacles to be faced by a group of colonists [and] taking a page from Lord of the Flies, Howey’s young colonists soon discover that the greatest threat comes not from a hostile planet, but from within themselves.

—Booklist

Half Way Home is a tense, imaginative yarn by a rising master of science fiction. Howey dazzles with scope and cuts deep with intimacy. Incisive prose and boundless imagination make this a Howey classic.

—Pierce Brown, New York Times best-selling author of the Red Rising series

A fast-moving story that puts one in mind of Heinlein’s classic young adult novels.

—Neal Stephenson, New York Times best-selling author of Fall, or Dodge in Hell

Brilliant pacing. Vivid characters. Realistic science. Hugh Howey’s Half Way Home tackles the tribal instincts currently tearing the world apart, giving fresh insights into the psychology of group-think. It’s Lord of the Flies among the stars!

—Peter Cawdron, author of Retrograde and Reentry