Four-Day Planet

Fenris is a world of extremes: a thousand-hour day so hot it drives humanity underground, followed by a thousand-hour night so cold that only an Extreme Environment Suit keeps you breathing. Walter Boyd, a cynical reporter for the planet's lone newspaper, knows this brutal rhythm intimately. He's watched exploiters come and go, watched honest hunters get cheated of the wealth they bled for, watched Steve Ravick and his cronies grow fat on corruption while the rest of them scrape by. Then Glenn Murell arrives on the Peenemünde, a mysterious author with secrets that could tear the power structure apart. Boyd's curiosity pulls him into a conspiracy that threatens everything, and when you've got nothing left to lose on a planet like this, revolution starts to look like the only rational choice. Piper builds a world so vividly hostile it feels like a character itself, and his portrait of frontier people refusing to break is quietly magnificent.