Oxygen comes next in our list of contemporary novels recommended by SpecFaith visitors:

Halfway to the Red Planet, an explosion leaves the four-member crew of the Ares 10 with only enough oxygen for one. Valkerie Jansen, the ship’s doctor, is tough, beautiful, and has an uncanny knack for survival. Bob Kaganovski, the ship’s mechanic, is paid to be paranoid—and he’s good at it. He’s worried that Valkerie is mentally unbalanced, possibly even dangerous. Which is just too bad, because Bob’s falling in love with her.

Meanwhile, NASA is trying to figure out who should live and who should die, when there’s only enough oxygen for one.

Excerpt from Oxygen

Bob Kaganovski had shampoo in his eyes when the decompression alarm went off.

He grabbed the suction hose and ran it frantically over his face and eyes. Footsteps pounded outside the shower.

“Decompression!” shouted Josh Bennett, mission commander of the Ares 10. “Get to the EVA suits now! We’ve got about fifteen minutes.”

Bob popped open the Velcroed shower door and grabbed a towel. Fear knotted his gut. Only fifteen minutes! He stepped out of the shower and swiped a towel across the soles of his feet, drying them just enough so he wouldn’t kill himself on the stairs.

He ran through a corridor to the steep circular stairway that led down to Level 1 of the Habitation Module. The decompression alarm beeped once every two seconds. The interval was keyed to cabin pressure. When it got down to vacuum, the beeps would merge into one steady drone. If he wasn’t in his suit by then, he wouldn’t hear it. For one thing, sound wouldn’t travel in a vacuum. For another, he’d be dead.

Randy Ingermanson likes to mix science, religion, romance, and adventure into his novels. He has a PhD from UC Berkeley in theoretical physics and has won two Christy awards for excellence in Christian fiction. He lives in the Pacific Northwest and serves the needs of three surly cats.

Learn more about Randy at his website or follow him on Facebook.

John Olson is a novelist and speaker who lives with his wife Amy and two kids in the San Francisco Bay Area. John earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and did postdoctoral research at the University of California at San Francisco. His novels have won several awards including a Christy Award, a Christy finalist, a Silver Angel award, and placement on the New York Public Library’s Books for the Teen Age.

Follow him on Facebook or find out more about him on his website.