Publisher's Synopsis
In the Golden Age of Planetary Exploration, high adventure met tedious monotony, and easy living and hard dying went hand in hand. Those days are gone, apart from the monotony and dying bit. All the best planets have been taken and sure, a few people have become immensely rich, but it is only a few and they're quite keen to keep it that way.
This is where the budget interstellar exploration companies come in. With travel between stars limited and it taking decades to get anywhere, humanity is only slowly spreading into the galaxy and hasn't got very far. Nobody wants to colonise somewhere that might turn out to be an inhospitable rock, so intrepid explorers are sent out first to check out the lay of the land, so to speak. If it's good they'll stay on as an advance guard for the colonists to follow. If they're lucky they'll stay alive. Inhospitable rocks can be quite unforgiving and even the greener, more benign watery worlds can turn out to be quite nasty. The local flora and fauna may not be so welcoming of incomers and you never know what horrible pathogen might be lurking in the nearest puddle. Enter the crew of the Independent Space Ship Ubiquitous Pioneer, an otherwise reliable old clunker, whose arrival on the Earth-like planet they have been sent to explore has not gone according to plan. They've not so much landed as gaspoded (Ground Assisted Spontaneous Pressurised Oxidation Disassembly Event), as the ship's malfunctioning Artificial Intelligence computer would have it...
