Threshold - Threshold, Bk 1 Author:Janet Morris, Chris Morris Set a millennium for now on Threshold Terminal -- virtually a Grand Hotel in space -- a young test pilot, Joe South, is thrust five hundred years into the future and finds himself in the thick of interstellar smuggling, intrigue, and the rough underworld of an alien environment.. — Threshold is a space habitat between the orbits of Mars and Jupit... more »er with a population of a quarter million. Run by a latter-day United Nations, one of its duties is to keep humans off of Earth, now a preserve. Thousands of Muslim pilgrims from other systems are not pleased at being kept from Mecca. Their leader's daughter decides to experience Threshold's decadent (to her) society with the heir to a powerful exploration corporation, who is also smuggling illegal life forms into the habitat, thus threatening the stability of a conference on the rights of nonhuman races and ALIs -- Artificial Living Individuals which the Muslims treat as they do their women: like property.
Captain Joseph South, on a test flight through interstellar spongespace, is translated 500 years into our future to arrive at Threshold just as all this is occurring. He has strange memories of a fly-by of system X-3, which match up with visions from an artifact brought to Threshold by a prospector.« less