In the year 2270, with travel to the nearby planets well established, a bizarre discovery is made on Callisto, the eighth moon of Jupiter. Dozens upon dozens of strange wheeled artifacts-wheelers-are found buried beneath the icy surface. No one knows what they were used for and who left them in our solar system. At the same time, it is discovered that the moons of Jupiter have moved from their age-old positions. A quickly formed expedition finds that Jupiter is inhabited by a race of balloon-like aliens, who defend their world against comet strikes by moving their moons using gravitational technology. This time, though, their redirection is aiming an incoming comet directly at Earth! Communication at first proves impossible, but an Earth child who has an intuitive understanding of animal behavior becomes the key to contacting them-and joining forces with them to save the world.
About the Author: Ian Stewart was born in 1945, educated at Cambridge (MA) and Warwick (PhD). He has five honorary doctorates and is Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at Warwick University. He has published over 80 books including Does God Play Dice?, Professor Stewart's Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities, Why Beauty is Truth, Flatterland, What Shape is a Snowflake?, Nature's Numbers, Professor Stewart's Incredible Numbers, Seventeen Equations that Changed the World, and the bestselling series The Science of Discworld I, II, III, and IV with Terry Pratchett and Jack Cohen. His new book Calculating the Cosmos will appear in September 2016 followed by Infinity: a Very Short Introduction in 2017. His awards include the Royal Society's Faraday Medal, the Gold Medal of the Institute for Mathematics and Its Applications, the Public Understanding of Science Award of the AAAS, and the LMS/IMA Zeeman Medal. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2001 and currently serves on Council, its governing body. He makes frequent radio and television appearances, including the 1997 Christmas Lectures. He is an active research mathematician with over 190 published papers, and works on pattern formation, chaos, network dynamics, and biomathematics. Jack Cohen is a retired biologist (hair, feathers, reproduction) and IVF consultant. His former students include Sir Paul Nurse, winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize for Medicine. He has been a Visiting Professor at the Weizmann Institute, Israel, and a consultant to the Ecosystems Unit and the Mathematics Institute at the University of Warwick, England. He has a longstanding interest in biologically realistic aliens and alien ecosystems, and has acted as consultant to top science fiction authors including Anne McCaffrey, Larry Niven, and David Gerrold. His books include Living Embryos, Reproduction, The Privileged Ape, and Stop Working and Start Thinking. With Terry Pratchett and Ian Stewart he wrote the bestselling four-volume Science of Discworld series. He and Stewart also coauthored The Collapse of Chaos, Figments of Reality, and What Does a Martian Look Like?, plus two SF novels, Wheelers and Heaven. Their SF short story Monolith was the final one in the first "Futures" series of the prestigious science journal Nature. His hobbies include boomerang-throwing and keeping strange animals. He has been married three times, has six children, and lives in Dorset, England.