Growing Up Weightless

Out of print for more than two decades, John M. Ford's Growing Up Weightless is an award-winning classic of a “lost generation” of young people born on the human-colonized Moon.

Matthias Ronay has grown up in the low gravity and great glass citadels of independent Luna―and in the considerable shadow of his father, a member of the council that governs Luna's increasingly complex society. But Matt feels weighed down on the world where he was born, where there is no more need for exploration, for innovation, for radical ideas―and where his every movement can be tracked by his father on the infonets.

Matt and five of his friends, equally brilliant and restless, have planned a secret adventure. They will trick the electronic sentinels, slip out of the city for a journey to Farside. Their passage into the expanse of perpetual night will change them in ways they never could have predicted...and bring Matt to the destiny for which he has yearned.

With a new introduction by Francis Spufford, author of Red Plenty and Golden Hill.

Tor Essentials presents new editions of science fiction and fantasy titles of proven merit and lasting value, each volume introduced by an appropriate literary figure.

Francis Spufford is the author of several highly praised books of nonfiction, including his debut, I May Be Some Time, which won the Writers’ Guild Award for Best Nonfiction Book of 1996, the Banff Mountain Book Prize, and a Somerset Maugham Award. It was followed by The Child That Books Built, Backroom Boys, Red Plenty (translated into nine languages), and Unapologetic. His first novel, Golden Hill, won the Costa First Novel Award. In 2007 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He teaches writing at Goldsmiths College and lives near Cambridge.