Downfall Tide

Aeon's Legacy, #2

This is a sequel to the novel Hurricane Moon. At the outset of that book, Earth was wracked by climate change and political upheaval. An ambitious private foundation launched a starship to find a new world.  The starship Aeon sought a planet with a large moon to ensure Earthlike tides and seasons.  Aeon finally found a new world with an apparently primitive ecosystem and a huge ocean moon covered with hurricanes. But the human genome had been insidiously damaged by the cryostasis— cold suspended animation—that went on too long. Astronaut-physician Catharin Gault and molecular biologist Joseph Devreze had to learn how to repair the genome for there to be any human future on Planet Green. Soon they and everyone else collided with their highest hopes and worst fears—and, in some cases, with the past they thought they’d left behind on Earth. 

Downfall Tide begins twenty-four years after the events in Hurricane Moon. Much has changed, thanks to unremitting hard work by the Catharin and Joe and the others in the first generation of explorers and colonists. They’ve founded a new civilization on Planet Green. They’ve begun to understand Green’s deceptively simple-looking ecosystem. To better understand the huge blue moon and the rest of the solar system, the starship Aeon is taking its last journey of exploration, to the outer planets. 
And then a brilliant, strange new star appears in the evening sky of Planet Green. 

It signals the beginning’s end.