Description:

The Award-Winning Thriller Oxygen and Its Gripping Sequel The Fifth Man

Halfway to Mars, an explosion leaves the four-astronaut crew of the Ares 10 with only enough oxygen for one.

Valkerie Jansen, the ship’s doctor, is tough, beautiful, and has an uncanny knack for survival.

Bob Kaganovski, the ship's mechanic, is paid to be paranoid -- and he's good at it. He’s worried that Valkerie is mentally unbalanced, possibly even dangerous.

Which is just too bad, because Bob’s falling in love with her. Despite his best efforts.

Meanwhile, NASA is trying to figure out who should live and who should die, when there’s only enough oxygen for one astronaut to reach the Red Planet.

About the Series

Oxygen and its sequel The Fifth Man are Mars suspense novels that mix science, religion, romance, and adventure—a quarter of a million words of high-tension action that will make you forget bedtime.

Oxygen won the 2002 Christy award for best futuristic novel in Christian fiction. The Fifth Man was a 2003 finalist in the same category.

The Oxygen Series Box Set will take you on a wretched, miserable, dangerous vacation to Mars in a stinking, cramped, failing spaceship. And once you get there, you’ll find that the real danger is something you brought with you—if only you could figure out what that something is.

Excerpt

Bob Kaganovski had shampoo in his eyes when the decompression alarm went off.

He grabbed the suction hose and ran it frantically over his face and eyes. Footsteps pounded outside the shower.

“Decompression!” shouted Josh Bennett, mission commander of the Ares 10. “Get to the EVA suits now! We’ve got about fifteen minutes.”

Bob popped open the Velcroed shower door and grabbed a towel. Fear knotted his gut. Only fifteen minutes! He stepped out of the shower and swiped a towel across the soles of his feet, drying them just enough so he wouldn’t kill himself on the stairs.

He ran through a corridor to the steep circular stairway that led down to Level 1 of the Habitation Module. The decompression alarm beeped once every two seconds. The interval was keyed to cabin pressure. When it got down to vacuum, the beeps would merge into one steady drone. If he wasn’t in his suit by then, he wouldn’t hear it. For one thing, sound wouldn’t travel in a vacuum. For another, he’d be dead.

**

Review

Praise For the Science Fiction Suspense Novels Oxygen and *The Fifth Man:*

Booklist (starred review): "Olson and Ingermanson draw their characters carefully, keep tension high, and introduce real spiritual dilemmas without being preachy. They capture the ironic repartee of astronauts to the last nuance. The result is a real delight."

Library Journal: "Olson and Ingermanson combine solid science fiction with an increasingly tense mystery for a fantastic addition to any collection."

Moody: "From the vivid first danger...to the unexpected conclusion, this tale will keep you turning pages late into the night."

The SF Site: "...grabs you and won't let you go until you reach the last page."

From the Author

In the spring of 1999, when we began planning this novel, hopes were running high within the Mars Society. 

Might Mars enthusiasts persuade the next US president to launch a Kennedy-style space race to put humanity on Mars? If so, then the earliest realistic year for a mission would be 2014. 

We ran some calculations and found that it would be possible for the first human to step onto Martian regolith on July 4, 2014.

On the strength of that giddy hope, we wrote and published Oxygen in May of 2001. The book sold well and won several awards. We followed it up a year later with The Fifth Man.

As it turned out, the Mars initiative never happened. Instead, 9/11 happened--only a few months after Oxygen released. The US soon found itself mired on the road to Baghdad. 

The road to Mars remains the road not taken. 

And yet ...

And yet Mars is still a possible future for mankind.

Humans could walk on Mars within a dozen years if we chose to. 

We based this novel mostly on the "Mars Semi-direct" mission architecture popularized by Mars Society president Robert Zubrin, with some ideas taken from NASA's Mars Reference Mission Document and the Caltech Mars Society proposed mission. 

Humans could walk on Mars within a dozen years. 

Will we ever take that first step?