The Final Frontier: The Future History of Humanity in Space is a work in progress. It is a collaboration between author/editor Alan Seeger and his associates, L.L. Phelps and Kevin W. Smith. All three are space science aficionados, and the completed book promises to be a tour de force imagining that begins in the stone age with a prime example of early man staring up at the stars and will end with Humanity colonizing far-flung regions of the galaxy.

This particular excerpt, QBL: The Teagarden Chronicles, is a look at one young man who lives on the one habitable moon of a gas giant that circles what is now called Teegarden’s Star, but barely qualifies as a star at all. It’s a brown dwarf, and in the millennia to come, when humans build a colony on that moon, they shall refer to the parent body of the system simply as "Teagarden."

The chalky white rock of the moon, much like the White Cliffs of Dover on Old Earth, which by this time has become incapable of supporting life, give it an appearance that reminds the colonists of a cue ball, and when the spaceport designation is assigned as QBL, well, it’s just too perfect -- Cueball it is.

Generations come and go, and a young man grows up on Cueball, never having known any other home, or any sunlight apart from the reddish glow of Teagarden, like the orange light of a space heater.

But he’s heard stories.

When the opportunity arises for him to finally leave and seek adventure, he siezes the brass ring.