Book reviews
Convention List
Submit your con
Preliminary New Books list
Endless Worlds Project
Sell your house on the web
Advertising rates
Get paid to surf!!
Small business help
Affiliate programs
Daily crossword
Families and more
Contact us hereAuthor: Buzz Aldrin and John Barnes
Publisher: Warner/Aspect
Year: 1997
ISBN: 0446604046
Description: 656 pages
The cover blurb describes this book as "a 10,000-year epic". That, in and of itself explains the fact that it runs 656 pages. It's actually 3 stories in one, told in an interleaved fashion, tying together an adventure (or misadventure if you will) that took place 8,000 years before Christ, a near future misadventure involving NASA and international "cooperation" in space, and a voyage of exploration in the final third of the 21st century.
The latter story is the one that is used to recount the other two. Early in the 21st century, a message from the Centauri star system arrives notifying its recipients that there are two "encyclopedias" of great knowledge located at the south pole of the moon, and on Mars. The news of alien intelligent life rocks the world and the major governments. Because of cutbacks at NASA, along with an accident that crippled NASA's shuttle program, the five major space powers (US, Russia, Europe, Japan and China) are forced to pool their resources in order to retrieve the encyclopedia on the moon. But there are subterfuges taking place within the uneasy alliance forcing the expedition to make foolish and ultimately tragic decisions. However, what was found there was that a small colony of aliens had established a primitive base at the south pole, using the water ice that had built up in the shadows of the craters there. The colony had failed and the aliens were dead. But bits and pieces of their culture and their technology were found, and "Tiberian Studies" became a major field of academia in the years that followed.
Because the moon expedition failed in its goal of retrieving the Encyclopedia, the expedition to Mars was carefully laid out in incremental fashion. First were missions to Phobos, one of the two moons of Mars. There, they found debris, suggesting that the "Tiberians" had created a base there, but had left it. Finally, 24 years after the disasterous mission to the moon, after several missions to Mars, the Encyclopedia there is recovered, and the data extracted and deciphered. Near the Encyclopedia were the remains of another failed Tiberian colony, along with the bodies of many Tiberians.
From this, we learn the story of the Tiberians -- who they were, why they came, and, indirectly, why their attempts at settlement on the moon and Mars (and Earth!) had failed. We discover that, while they were alien, they still had many of the foibles and failures that humans have. Finally, we have the mission to Centauri, aboard a starship based on the science that was discovered in the Encyclopedia. The journey to Tiber is long (13 years), symbolicly leaving on the 100th anniversary of the first landing on the moon. They leave, knowing in advance that they are unlikely to meet the Tiberians when they get there. In fact, what they discover, other than relics that had been described in the Encyclopedias, was that they had only journeyed part of the way out to where the descendants of the Tiberians now lived.
Score: 81 out of 100. I've read this book twice -- each time getting something new and different from it. The marvel of an alien civilization that is surprisingly not much different from our own, the plausible description of how we today can create a significant, worthy manned space program, and tales of folly and heroism, all wrapped up in one book. There are slow, dry passages that a reader will have to fight through, but, all in all, it most definitely is worth the effort. Will there be a sequel? I really hope so.
