Stardance

Shara Drummond was a gifted dancer and a brilliant choreographer, but she could not pursue her dream of dancing on Earth. So she went to space, creating a new art form in three dimensions. And when the aliens arrived, there was only one way to prove that the human race deserved not just to survive, but to reach the stars. The only hope was Shara, with her stardance. The Hugo and Nebula Award—winning Stardance series pioneered the concept of zero gravity dance, which even sparked the interest of NASA and shortlisted co-author Jeanne Robinson for a seat on a space shuttle to become the first actual freefall dancer in space. Though the Challenger explosion cancelled that dream, now Jeanne is being given a second chance to choreograph dance in space ... on film.

This sequel to Stardance returns to the rarified world of Top Step, an asteroid in orbit above twenty-first-century Earth. There, for the price of all one's worldly possessions, humans are able to live in a vaccum indefinitely by joining with a symbiotic lifeform that provides all needed nourishment. For Rain McLeod, a forty-six-year-old dancer whose failing body is about to end her career, the Starseed program is the only way to continue living her dream. But for others, including several religious groups and power hungry countries back on earth, the existence of Stardancers represents a threat to all humanity. When a missle attack threatens Top Step and Rain's lover, Robert, is implicated as a prime suspect, Rain must choose between her private dream and the greater good in a world poised on the verge of an evolutionary leap.

This concluding novel in the Stardance Trilogy takes readers to the year 2064; Earth is enjoying an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity due to the Starmind, a universal overmind engineered by benevolent aliens. Art in all its forms flourishes, and composer Rand Porter has been offered the job of a lifetime as a shaper of visual effects and music in High Orbit for the world's most famous zero-gravity dance company. But his beloved novelist wife, Rhea Paixao, has her roots sunk deep in the Earth and her beloved Cape Cod. As they wrestle with their private dilemma, bizarre things-small miracles, really-are beginning to occur everywhere on Earth and throughout the entire Solar System. The human race and its evolutionary successors, the space-dwelling Stardancers, find themselves approaching the terrifying cusp of their shared destiny, an appointment made for them a million years ago-a make-or-break point beyond which nothing, anywhere, can ever be the same again.