Darwin's Universe: Origins and Crises in the History of Life

This book and its sister publication Time Gate, though written two decades ago, STILL reads like a revolutionary view of the future. Pellegrino was one of the framers of the US/Soviet Space Cooperation Initiative, advocating and predicting an international space station, as a springboard to Mars and Europa, even before President Reagan announced the building of an American Space Station. He invented the dinosaur cloning recipe used in "Jurassic Park," predicted the discovery of oceans and the possibility of life inside the iceworlds circling Jupiter and Saturn, and even showed how interstellar flight at 92% lightspeed might be possible by the mid-21st century. In this brief history of life on Earth, we can see the first hints of the elegant writing style that we would come to love in his later books, both in his science and his gripping science fiction.