Starman's Quest

Two brothers, one starship, and a universe that refuses to keep time. When the Explorer launches on humanity's first interstellar journey, the twins make a pact: whatever happens, they will face it together. But Einstein's relativity has other plans. As the ship streaking toward Alpha Centauri ages only months while Earth orbits the sun for decades, one brother watches helplessly through the viewplate as his twin grows old, marries, builds a life, and dies, while he remains impossibly young. Now the astronaut has returned to a world that has moved on without him, searching for the son who remembers him only as a photograph, searching for meaning in a life where everyone he loved has become a memory. Robert Silverberg, writing with a teenager's fierce energy, crafted this 1968 novel as a meditation on what we sacrifice when we reach for the stars, and who we become when the universe denies us the simple mercy of shared time.