For anyone who hasn’t seen the news, this is the second week in a row where the science fiction and fantasy world has lost someone near and dear. On Thursday, Sir Terry Pratchett, author of the Discworld series, died of complications from early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. He was 66, which is much, much too young. He left behind a legacy of fascinating, bizarre and humorous views of our world, as told through the lens of his Discworld series. His last tweets tell a story of Death from the Discworld coming for him. And of course Death came for him personally, because in the Discworld, Death always comes in person to escort wizards to whatever is beyond.
The story of the men and women who drove the Voyager spacecraft mission— told by a scientist who was there from the beginning.
The Voyager spacecraft are our farthest-flung emissaries—11.3 billion miles away from the crew who built and still operate them, decades since their launch.
Voyager 1 left the solar system in 2012; its sister craft, Voyager 2, will do so in 2015. The fantastic journey began in 1977, before the first episode of Cosmos aired. The mission was planned as a grand tour beyond the moon; beyond Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn; and maybe even into interstellar space. The fact that it actually happened makes this humanity’s greatest space mission.
In The Interstellar Age, award-winning planetary scientist Jim Bell reveals what drove and continues to drive the members of this extraordinary team, including Ed Stone, Voyager’s chief scientist and the one-time head of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab; Charley Kohlhase, an orbital dynamics engineer who helped to design many of the critical slingshot maneuvers around planets that enabled the Voyagers to travel so far; and the geologist whose Earth-bound experience would prove of little help in interpreting the strange new landscapes revealed in the Voyagers’ astoundingly clear images of moons and planets.
Speeding through space at a mind-bending eleven miles a second, Voyager 1 is now beyond our solar system’s planets. It carries with it artifacts of human civilization. By the time Voyager passes its first star in about 40,000 years, the gold record on the spacecraft, containing various music and images including Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” will still be playable.
My Review:
I had the same reaction to The Interstellar Age as I did when I went to the Kennedy Space Center a few years ago. I got choked up. Why? Because to this Star Trek fan, space travel is awesome and the future and I’m not going to get to go. Life is too short, and Congress doesn’t give NASA nearly enough funding for space tourism for the middle class to become “real” in my lifetime.
I will tie this back to Star Trek at the end, believe it or not.
But about the book…if you were ever hooked on space travel science fiction, or if you got up in the middle of the night to watch Neil Armstrong land on the moon, or if you’ve ever traveled to see a shuttle launch (or any kind of spacecraft launch) or if you can’t get enough Hubble Telescope pictures, this is a book for you.
While without rockets, it’s just science, this is a science story told through the people who worked on it or were affected by it. While, as one of the researchers says, we shouldn’t try to humanize or personalize the little rovers and probes that form the bulk of our current space program because, and I quote, “they don’t like it”, we can’t help but invest them with personalities and motivations of their own. They represent us. In a slightly robotic way, they are us, or at least the part of us that needs to go out and explore.
Possibly, as this recent strip from xkcd attests, they represent other parts of us as well:
Back to Voyager and The Interstellar Age. I want to invoke Star Trek again. Because these are the voyages of the Interstellar Voyager Project, its ongoing mission: “to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no (Terran) has gone before.”
Voyager 1
In the past 40 years, and continuing, the two Voyager space probes, and the probes that followed in their wake, have extended human knowledge of our solar system, and are now either completely outside of our Solar System (Voyager 1) or are getting there fast (Voyager 2). We humans have sent a piece of ourselves into the space between the stars, both in the hopes that we can continue to learn from its explorations, and that someday, perhaps, some other civilization in some other star-system will scoop it up and discover who we were.
The project is huge and was in many ways all encompassing for the people who worked on it. There are folks now part of the project who were not born when it began in the mid-1970s. But the story of their involvement, in this thing that turns out to have been the biggest and the best time of their lives, is very human and awe-inspiring in that humanity. It’s impossible not to wish you were there when those first photos of Jupiter’s moons appeared. Or with any of the other many firsts accomplished by these probes and the team that worked with them.
In relating the effect that his personal involvement with the Voyager mission has had on his life, the author shows us not just why this journey was important for him, but why it is important for us all.
Reality Rating A: I have a difficult time separating my feelings about the space program from my feelings about the book. Why? Because I want to have been there, and that still touches me deeply.
There are probably a generation (or two) of us who watched Star Trek as kids and saw the hope that humanity would reach the stars. I think we all wanted it to be in our lifetimes, but that is unlikely to happen.
This is a book about the joys and wonders of “big science”. It takes hundreds if not thousands of people devoting their lives and their careers to making project like the Interstellar Voyager mission a success. Or even a possibility. The Interstellar Age is the story of not just how it worked, but why.
It’s also a 40th birthday paean to the Voyager Program itself, and to the people who built them and made them fly.
As a reader, I occasionally got sidetracked with the names of all the different component parts, but all things considered, The Interstellar Age is a popular science story at its best.
One last Star Trek reference. The first Star Trek movie, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, was released in 1979, two years after the launches of Voyagers 1 and 2. In ST:TMP, at the heart of the alien vessel they find Voyager 6, returning to Earth in search of its creator, NASA.
Voyager 6 from Star Trek: The Motion Picture
Some day, centuries from now, one of the Voyagers, scarred and pitted by the interstellar winds, might come home – in the arms (or tentacles) of explorers from another star system.
We can dream.
***FTC Disclaimer: Most books reviewed on this site have been provided free of charge by the publisher, author or publicist. Some books we have purchased with our own money or borrowed from a public library and will be noted as such. Any links to places to purchase books are provided as a convenience, and do not serve as an endorsement by this blog. All reviews are the true and honest opinion of the blogger reviewing the book. The method of acquiring the book does not have a bearing on the content of the review.
Don’t forget that today is National Reading Day. Although the day is supposed to encourage reading by younger children, I don’t see why we can’t ALL celebrate by curling up with a good book or two.
As far as good books, or at least new books, this may be the first time in a long time (if ever) that I have bought more books than I received review copies. Or at least the first time since I started blogging. I loved Anna Hackett’s In the Devil’s Nebula so much that I just had to get the rest of the series. Yum!
I don’t know why it makes me feel better when I get to the end of the week and only have a short stack; I already have so many books to read that I probably won’t finish in my lifetime.
Hello, my name is Marlene and I’m a biblioholic.
Speaking of things I’m looking forward to getting around to, Humble Bundle has yet another book bundle, and this time it’s Star Trek comics. If you like Trek, it’s definitely worth checking out.
Galen calls this the “flavor text”, a term which I find hilarious. Text has no flavor. Well, maybe.
I’m slightly punchy because we came back from NASFiC this morning, and my body clock doesn’t know what time zone it’s in. On that infamous other hand, Detcon1 was awesome! Next year in Spokane for WorldCon.
In addition to all the lovely books that Galen showcased in yesterday’s post, there was one more important acquisition. And I’m afraid to open the suitcase for fear that something happened to it in transit and I’m going to cry.
The Artist Guest of Honor at Detcon was John Picacio. I purchased one of his drawings in the art show, and it’s awesome. Because the rights aren’t available for reproduction, I’ll just give you a taste.
The drawing is the combined covers of the three Star Trek Cruciblenovels, so it’s a triple portrait of Kirk, Spock and McCoy from the original series. It’s beautiful, and from a fan’s perspective, it’s just the way that I remember them. (That’s a comment on the art and NOT the stories. I read the stories when the books came out, and I remember them as being, in order: Not bad, not true to character, and WTF)
The theme for this year’s Midsummer Blog Hop is out of this world. No really, this is a science fiction romance group, so that’s the theme. Which “out of this world” setting is your favorite? Or my favorite, as the case may be.
If I had to pick an imagined future that I would want to live in, it would still, even all these years later, be Gene Roddenberry’s vision of the future from the original Star Trek series. By the time that Kirk & Co. flew the original Enterprise out of the San Francisco shipyards in 2245, the Federation seems to have solved most of the problems that we have today. It’s not just that it would take a “post-scarcity economy” to come up with something like the Prime Directive, but that everyone on the Enterprise, and her namesakes A, B, C, D and E all seem to enjoy their jobs and have such purpose. Somedays I envy them. The universe of the reboot seems to have gone to hell in handcart. I wouldn’t want to live there, even if it is entertaining to visit.
What fictional universe would you most want to live in? And which one do you think would be worth an adventure visit?
As a blogger-member of the SFR Brigade, my mission, and I have decided to accept it (no apologies for trope mixing) is to promote science fiction romance in general, and today, the Midsummer Blog Hop in particular.
~~Giveaway Details~~
On Friday 21st June (that’s TODAY!) the SFR Brigade is holding its Second Annual Blog Hop to celebrate Midsummer!
Here are the grand prizes (open to all!):
1st Prize – $150 Amazon or B&N gift card (winner’s choice) and an ebook bundle (currently Ghost in the Machine, Bayne, Recast Book 1:Wither, Recast Book 2:Clash, Alien Adoration, Switched, Reckless Rescue, Wreck of the Nebula Dream, Keir, Terms & Conditions Apply, The Key, Marya, The Iron Admiral, Sasha’s Calling, Trouble at the Hotel Baba Ghanoush, Winter in Paradise, Once Upon a Time in Space, The Telomere Trilogy, Winter Fusion, Blue Nebula, Demential, Wytchfire, Maven, Fires of Justice, Interface, Girl under Glass, Breakout, The Plan, Starburst and Stark Pleasure.
Bonus books – Ghost Planet, The Iron Admiral: Conspiracy and Deception, and Games of Command)
2nd Prize – $50 Amazon or B&N gift card (winner’s choice)
3rd Prizes – four $25 Amazon or B&N gift cards (given to separate winners and their choice)
For a chance to win one of the grand prizes, use the Rafflecopter at the end of the post.
In addition to the grand prize, one lucky commenter at Reading Reality will be chosen by the ever popular Random.org to win a $10 Amazon Gift Card from yours truly. So be sure to leave a comment here before you hop around to the rest of the SFR Brigade.
One of the books in this week’s stack (The Spook Lights Affair) is not scheduled to be published until December! I’m not sure whether to be delighted to have so much time to get a round tuit, or appalled that the year is passing by so quickly. <groan>
On another topic, someone asked how I make the graphic of all the book covers. I use GIMP, an open-source graphics program that is available free and supposed to be every bit as powerful as Photoshop. GIMP certainly does everything I need it to. (If you decide to use GIMP, it’s good karma to support the project.)
Photographing the actual books isn’t an option, almost all my books are in the key of “e”. Only the library book is a print book, and I’m not allowed to keep it more than three weeks.
If I got this many print books every week, our apartment would have sunk down into the one below by now! 😉
In case you’ve missed it, we’re Star Trek fans. If you are, and you missed the showing of the Star Trek TNG episode The Best of Both Worlds on the big screen this week, you missed a real treat. Not just because the remastered edition is awesome (and a terrific commercial for the Blu-Ray edition damn it!) but because it was great to be in a theater full of fans. Trek can still fill a theater. The original canonTrek can still fill a theater. <insert raspberry here> Which doesn’t mean I didn’t like the reboot and that I’m not going to see Star Trek Into Darkness.
The reboot is fun, but it isn’t quite my Star Trek.
Getting down off my soap box and moving on to the blog, there is still time to enter the Magic Touch Blog Hop. Lots of people are saying that the magic touch they would most like to have is the power to heal. I’m still thinking of Suzanne Selfors book, The Sweetest Spell. I want the power of CHOCOLATE! With enough chocolate, you can heal pretty much anything.
There is also a bit of time to get in on the giveaway for 4 $25 Amazon gift cards from Elise Sax in celebration of her hilarious new romantic suspense story, An Affair to Dismember. Her guest post about a day in the life of her heroine is a laugh out loud read!
And finally, Jenny Davidson is giving away a copy of her fascinating look at immersion in games, and the difference between playing and role-playing, The Magic Circle. This one haunts.
I have two guests this week! Speaking of reboots, on Monday, John Marco will be here to talk about the reboot of his Bronze Knight series, an absolutely awesome epic fantasy series. Since his reboot is starting with The Forever Knight, I’ll also have a review of that book and John will be giving away a signed copy of the book.
On Thursday taking a completely different tack, I’ll be reviewing Rules of Entanglement, the second book in Gina L. Maxwell’s Fighting for Love series, after the tremendously fun Seducing Cinderella (reviewed at Book Lovers Inc.) I’ll also have a guest post from Gina and she’ll be giving away a copy of Rules to one lucky winner.
Format read: ebook provided by NetGalley Formats available: ebook Genre: space opera Series: Star Trek: The Next Generation Length: 94 pages Publisher: Pocket Books Date Released: March 25, 2013 Purchasing Info:Author’s Website, Publisher’s Website, Goodreads, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo
The Enterprise-E arrives in unclaimed space for a rendezvous with the Starfleet science vessel Newton. Jean-Luc Picard and his crew have been ordered to assist the Newton with the final phase of its current mission—a mission that brings Picard face to face with something he never thought he would see again: the phenomenon known as the Nexus. Less than twelve years after it left the Alpha Quadrant, the Nexus ribbon has now returned. Tasked to track and study the phenomenon as it re-entered the galaxy, the specialist science team on the Newton discovered that the orbital path of the Nexus has been radically altered by the actions of the rogue El-Aurian Tolian Soren—taking it deep into the territory of The Holy Order of the Kinshaya, one of the key members of the Typhon Pact. Starfleet Command is unwilling to allow the Kinshaya—and by extension, the Typhon Pact—free access to what is essentially a gateway to anywhere and anywhen, as a single operative could use the Nexus to change the course of galactic history….
Guest Review by Galen
Sometimes the name of the game is keep-away. The Nexus, which was at the heart of the movie Star Trek: Generations, has wandered close to the territory of a rival to the Federation. The Nexus is tempting on many levels. Somebody who figures out how to control it would have possession of a powerful time machine, and that prospect is of course rather concerning. The Nexus is also tempting as an object of scientific curiosity. One of the things that Captain Picard is quickly faced with in The Stuff of Dreams is navigating between those two temptations.
The Nexus also offers a very personal temptation: someone who enters it can have a perfect life, or at least a good facsimile thereof. Or perhaps, just the life they desire. Therein lies the deeper story.
Escape Rating C+:The Stuff of Dreamsis a competent addition to the TNG series, but works best as a palate cleanser between novels. Readers who are new to the recent TNG book series may find themselves a bit lost. To best appreciate Swallow’s entry, I recommend first reading the Destinytrilogy by David Mack and at least dipping into one or two of the Typhon Pactstories.
One of the (guilty?) pleasures of reading media tie-ins is getting the chance to see loose ends tied up. It can also be nice to see connections being drawn between apparently separate stories in the fictional universe. However, stories that aim to invoke that apophenia risk overshooting. The fallout from the events of the Destiny trilogy are going to provide a deep well for TNG reboot authors to dip into for a long time. However, by touching on that andGenerationsand the Typhon Pact and time travel (including a throw-away reference to the Department of Temporal Investigations), The Stuff of Dreams crossed the line into being too much of a name-checklist of recent Trek. In particular, I think that dropping either the Kinshaya or the Newton would have made for a tighter story.
As an exploration of survivor guilt, The Stuff of Dreams has a place on the shelf for folks who have enjoyed the TNG reboot novels, but does not otherwise stand alone or stand out.
***FTC Disclaimer: Most books reviewed on this site have been provided free of charge by the publisher, author or publicist. Some books we have purchased with our own money and will be noted as such. Any links to places to purchase books are provided as a convenience, and do not serve as an endorsement by this blog. All reviews are the true and honest opinion of the blogger reviewing the book. The method of acquiring the book does not have a bearing on the content of the review.
Format read: Trade Paperback provided by the author Formats available: Trade Paperback, ebook Genre: Science Fiction Series: Spectra #1 Length: 368 pages Publisher: MuseItUp Publishing Date Released: June 27, 2011 Purchasing Info:Author’s Website, Publisher’s Website, Goodreads, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Book Depository
Light years away from Earth a mining exploration crew makes an amazing discovery…intelligent life comprised entirely of energy. This living energy is so pure and unique, it could provide proof of the existence of the human soul. Those exposed to the entities gain unimaginable cognitive abilities but at a terrible cost.A rogue scientific group will do anything to maintain their mind-enhancing gifts, even if it leads to the destruction of the peaceful beings. Only two people stand in their way, and they will sacrifice everything to end the slaughter.Could the quest for the secrets of life lead to the creation of true evil; one so dark it threatens to tear down the walls of sanity and redefine our very existence?
On Star Trek, alien life almost always looked pretty much like us–bipedal, humanoid, and pretty generally human-shaped as well. There were occasional variations, like blue skin and antennae (remember the Andorians?) but the alien races were limited to the human actors.
One notable exception was the Next Gen episode “Home Soil“, where the aliens discovered by the terraformers turn out to be silicon-crystal based. They are tiny beings, but they are physical. And the proposed terraforming of their planet will kill them.
I raise this example because it bears some similarities to the story in Joanne Elder’s Spectra, but Elder has added multiple layers of complexity to her tale. On Spectra, the planet, a mining exploration group discovers a planet rich in minerals, and something extra–a life form that is pure energy.
It is also purely several other things: purely good, purely curious, and purely able to enhance the intellectual capabilities of the humans who come into contact with it. There’s only one problem. As the energy forms are absorbed by the humans, they die. Our enhancement comes at a great price to the tiny energy life forms. Hundreds, thousands of them die to enhance one human. And the process needs to be repeated or the human fades back to what they were. It’s somewhat addictive to go from being average to being DaVinci. Or Einstein.
Once their curiosity is sated about the physical beings who have invaded their world, they beg the humans to leave. Of the six people in the mining group, four agree to leave and declare the planet off-limits, two disagree but seemingly bow to the will of the group.
Then people start dying. Because those two who disagreed, well, one of them, Ivan, finally found himself smarter than everyone else for the first time in his life, and he just wasn’t willing to let that feeling go. So he went back to Spectra, and brought back some of those aliens. Just to augment himself and a few select friends. And get research grants. And get rich.
And kill anyone who might stand in his way. Including the four people who said no.
But as Ivan got smarter, his plans and plots got more convoluted. Back to Star Trek, as Scotty famously said, “the more they over-think the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain.” Especially since those entities are very, very unhappy about the whole situation, and even without bodies, have ways of making their displeasure felt.
Escape Rating B+: There’s a lot going on in Spectra, and all of it is fascinating. The discovery of the entities, and what they do to get themselves freed makes for one cool story. As part of the plot to keep the whole situation with the entities under wraps, Ivan’s machinations to get one of his colleagues from that mining expedition framed for murdering another, and how that all finally goes to smash makes for an exciting and harrowing prison break story.
There is, as is often the case in science fiction, an underlying ethical question. What would you do in the same situation? The scientific breakthroughs enabled by exposure to the entities appear to be astounding. But the entities die from the exposure. Is it worth it? This is not a question of whether the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, but whether the needs of this many over here outweigh the needs of that many over there?
When we meet our first aliens, how will we decide?
***FTC Disclaimer: Most books reviewed on this site have been provided free of charge by the publisher, author or publicist. Some books we have purchased with our own money and will be noted as such. Any links to places to purchase books are provided as a convenience, and do not serve as an endorsement by this blog. All reviews are the true and honest opinion of the blogger reviewing the book. The method of acquiring the book does not have a bearing on the content of the review.
For anyone who hasn’t seen the news, this is the second week in a row where the science fiction and fantasy world has lost someone near and dear. On Thursday, Sir Terry Pratchett, author of the Discworld series, died of complications from early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. He was 66, which is much, much too young. He left behind a legacy of fascinating, bizarre and humorous views of our world, as told through the lens of his Discworld series. His last tweets tell a story of Death from the Discworld coming for him. And of course Death came for him personally, because in the Discworld, Death always comes in person to escort wizards to whatever is beyond.
As a blogger-member of the SFR Brigade, my mission, and I have decided to accept it (no apologies for trope mixing) is to promote science fiction romance in general, and today, the Midsummer Blog Hop in particular.
