What if you were stranded. On a spaceship. Four light years from Earth. With a hundred tourists. And you are the captain. Then things start to go wrong. Welcome aboard the Endurance. It’ll be the trip of a lifetime.
For five years, Captain Lyn Randall of the Endurance has ferried tourists around the solar system for Omara Tours. Now, as she takes in the rings of Saturn for the last time, she’s looking forward to indulging in simpler pleasures like flying antique airplanes over her childhood home in Montana.
The routine tour becomes anything but when a mysterious phenomenon flings Endurance and two other ships into the Rigil Kentaurus system, four light years from Earth. Stranded, with no way to get back.
Lyn’s first duty is to rescue survivors from the other ships before she faces the most daunting task of her life, much less her career. She has to control her fears and grief to lead an untested crew and panicked guests on a quest for a new home planet or risk a return to their solar system that could kill them all. Unfortunately, Lyn’s past with a clandestine military mission gone wrong doesn’t sit well with some guests and crew members, and they don’t quite trust her.
Diana Squires, rescued from another stranded vessel, grudgingly reveals her identity as the daughter of scientists who researched traversable wormholes. To complicate everything, Lyn develops an affection for Diana, something at odds with her responsibilities as captain and her unhealed grief over her own lost loved ones.
Feelings aside, suspicions aside, her own doubts about her ability to lead aside, Lyn has to fight to protect her passengers, her ship, and her heart.
GCLS
Winner
2023 GCLS Award for Science Fiction/Fantasy
"Imagine Star Trek Voyager, but done right. From among the hundreds of already existing novels about travelers lost in space, this one achieves the right mix of physics and humanism to build a well-rounded story. As Burnes's first foray into science fiction, Endurance proves unmissable." — Review, Nerds of a Feather, Flock Together
"This book was a complete surprise. An excellent one . . . I really hope the author has a sequel planned, and soon." — Review, Jude in the Stars
"Today is Christa McAuliffe Day" — I Heart Sapphfic
"2023—My Favorite Books of the Year" — Jude in the Stars
Mindancer Press
290 pp. ● 6x9
$17.95 (pb) ● $9.99 (eb)
ISBN 978-1-949290-85-1 (pb)
FICTION / Science Fiction / General
FICTION / Science Fiction / Action & Adventure
FICTION / LGBTQ+ / Lesbian
Publication Date: June 21, 2022
Elaine Burnes lives in western Massachusetts. After 20 years working and writing for a variety of environmental nonprofits, she tired of reality and turned to writing fiction in her spare time, publishing her first short story, “A Perfect Life,” in Skulls and Crossbones (Mindancer Press) in 2010. Since then, she’s had more stories published, including “A Certain Moon,” in the Golden Crown Literary Society Award–winning anthology Wicked Things from Ylva in 2014, and “Auto Repair,” which earned an honorable mention in the 2015 Saints and Sinners Short Fiction Contest. These are collected in A Perfect Life and Other Stories (GusGus Press, 2016), which won a Rainbow Award for Best Lesbian Anthology/Collection. Her first novel, Wishbone (Bedazzled Ink, 2015) received a 2016 Golden Crown Literary Society Award for Dramatic/General Fiction.
Q&A with Elaine Burnes – Women & Words