ISBN 0-441-11470-9 (US pbk)

"Howard V.Hendrix's debut novel, Lightpaths , is a near-future SF novel that looks seriously at the problems facing the globe today, and how those problems might be solved. Early in the next century, an experimental facility, the High Orbital Manufacturing Enterprise (HOME), has been established in near-Earth orbit by a joint venture between government and commercial enterprise. HOME is a orbiting petri-dish, designed to experiment with new ways of living, to develop new technologies and to look at the feasibility of moving parts of Earth's population off Earth...

"Hendrix looks carefully at this utopian social experiment, showing us the all too perfect idyll of a group of socially responsible people living together happily in a potentially harsh environment. At least one of the purposes of the book is to ask the question, if we know how to solve humanity's problems, why don't we?" --Jonathan Strahan (in Locus , Issue 441, Vol.39, No.4, October 1997).