..Steven Hawking's wheelchair's literary alias:


Would you like to know more?

Excellent premise: under his bizzaro physics [2] [3] [5] [7] [11] [13] [Glossary] time dilation works the opposite to the way it does in our universe, so when a calamity looms over the protagonists' homeworld their best hope is to build a generation ship, fly as fast as possible in a loop, and hope that the generations-worth of shiptime this buys the travellers will allow them to study and advance science enough that they can avert their planet's doom when they return in a few (stationary) years. Genius!

It's a trilogy, book one "The Clockwork Rocket" (OMG! I've been wanting to read a hard-SF/steampunk space exploration story for like forever!) is out in July in the U.S., September here.
(Guess when i had it in my heads that this novel was coming out?)