Up Against It

A prescient classic of crime politics and emergent AI in a future human-settled solar system Laura J. Mixon''s Up Against It is now reissued as a Tor Essential featuring an introduction by James S.A. Corey bestselling author of the Expanse series.Tor Essentials presents new editions of science fiction and fantasy titles of proven merit and lasting value each volume introduced by an appropriate literary figure.Jane Navio is the resource manager of Phoecea an asteroid colony poised on the knife-edge of a hard vacuum of unforgiving space. A mishap has dumped megatons of water and methane out the colony''s air lock putting the entire human population at risk.Jane discovers that the crisis may have been engineered by the Martian crime syndicate as a means of executing a coup that will turn Phocaea into a client-state. And if that wasn''t bad enough an AI that spawned during the emergency has gone rogue…and there''s a giant x-factor in the form of the transhumanist Viridian cult that lives in Phocaea''s bowels.Jane''s in the prime of her career—she''s only a bit over a century old—but the conflict between politics and life-support is tearing her apart. To save her colony and her career she''s going to have to solve several mysteries at once—a challenge that will put her up against all the difficulties contradictions and awkward compromises entailed in the human colonization of outer space.