Book review – Scienceandsf -A Blog Published by Robert A. Lawler

Book Review: ‘Project Hail Mary’ by Andy Weir.

‘Project Hail Mary’ is the third novel by Andy Weir, best known as the author of ‘The Martian’. Like Weir’s two earlier novels ‘Project Hail Mary’ is a fast paced, hard science fiction adventure with both a plausible plot and relatable characters. In many ways this is Weir’s forte, he always does his science and engineering homework beforehand so that as he writes he can describe the interior of a spaceship as accurately as another author could describe the interior of a Starbucks.

Cover art for ‘Project Hail Mary’ by Andy Weir. (Credit: Amazon.com)

And like Mark Watney in ‘The Martian’ Ryland Grace, the main character in ‘Project Hail Mary’, is the sort of person who solves problems by ‘Sciencing the shit out of them.’ As the novel opens, Grace wakes up aboard a spaceship with amnesia, and two dead astronauts for his only company. As the story goes along Grace remembers bits and pieces of his past, a commonly used plot device that allows Weir to fill in some backstory whenever he needs to.

Andy Weir seems drawn to characters who are problem solvers, which I guess is why I like his stories! (Credit: Meme Generator)

In fact there’s quite a lot of backstory. As Grace remembers his past Weir describes in detail the threat to our Sun, and therefore us, that prompted Project Hail Mary. He also describes the design and construction of the spaceship that will take three astronauts on an expedition to hopefully find a way to save our Solar System.

As an aid in visualizing what’s going on in the novel, Andy Weir even gives a drawing of the interstellar spaceship Hail Mary. (Credit: Kerbal Space Program Forums)

You see unlike ‘The Martian’ or Weir’s second novel ‘Artemis’, both of which took place inside our Solar System and only concerned terrestrial life forms, ‘Project Hail Mary’ takes place in the Tau Ceti system and deals with humans contacting alien life. With the rest of his crew having died while in hibernation, which is also the cause of his amnesia, Grace is all alone in another Solar System trying to save all of humanity from a threat that’s infecting multiple solar systems. Or is he alone; could there be another intelligent species in the same predicament as we are?

In ‘Project Hail Mary’ Ryland Grace may be the only human in the Tau Ceti star system but he isn’t alone. (Credit: Goodreads)

So you get a story of first contact with aliens while under the shadow of extinction for both species. Weir’s alien comes from the Epsilon Eridani system and lives in a very different, and deadly environment. Because of that the only time Grace and it touch is during an emergency that nearly destroys both ships and the result of that touch is that both creatures nearly die.

Some basic scenarios for contact with Extraterrestrials. In ‘Project Hail Mary’ a single human meets a single alien and both are in such desperate need that working together is the only way to save both their worlds. (Credit: Seth Baum et al, Pennsylvania State University)

Both human and alien work together however to save their worlds, that’s another idea Andy Weir seems to like to portray in his novels, how much more we can accomplish if we just try to work together. And there are a lot of problems for the two astronauts to solve before the end of the novel, another of Weir’s traits.

One small criticism I have is that the two expeditions show up in the Tau Ceti system at the virtually the same time looking for a solution to the same threat, what are the chances of that happening. In fact there are a number of such unlikely events in the novel. But of course any good story, especially a science fiction story, requires a little suspension of disbelief.

I guess ‘Suspension of Disbelief’ kinda depends on the circumstance. (Credit: Riky the Writer)

All in all ‘Project Hail Mary’ is a very good SF novel, I really enjoyed it. And unlike all too many SF novels these days it isn’t the first installment in a series of books. Andy Weir is apparently the sort of writer who has a good idea for a story and then writes the story without adding a lot of filler in order to stretch his idea out for three or four books.

Word out of Hollywood is that Ryan Gosling, who play Neil Armstrong in ‘First Man’ is in talks to star in and produce a movie version of ‘Project Hail Mary’. (Credit: The Daily Mail)

There’s no filler in ‘Project Hail Mary’, just probably the best science fiction novel I’ve read since…well, the ‘Martian’!

Book Review: ‘Return to Enceladus’ by Brandon Q. Morris.

Anyone who has been reading my reviews of Science Fiction novels will surely have noticed a certain trend of late. I am getting rather tired of interesting ideas that produce a really good single novel being turned into an entire series of books. The second book in a series may still be worth reading but it will certainly be inferior to the first. And the quality of the stories really decreases after that.

Author Brandon Q. Morris. (Credit: Mal Warwick on Books)

A case in point is the ‘Ice Worlds’ series by the author Brandon Q. Morris. The first novel ‘The Enceladus Mission’ was a good hard SF story about an unmanned probe discovering signs of life on Saturn’s moon Enceladus. A manned expedition aboard the space ship ILSE (which stands for International Life Search Expedition) is sent to both confirm the discovery and learn more about the life forms.

Cover of ‘Return to Enceladus’ by Brandon Q. Morris. (Credit: Amazon.com)

The description of ILSE was quite realistic and the entity on Enceladus was both different and intriguing, it was sort of one of those ‘group mind’ aliens that appear in some SF novels. All in all ‘The Enceladus Mission’ was a good book that I still recommend.

‘The Enceladus Mission’ was a good ‘hard SF’ novel with an interesting alien. (Credit: Audible.com)

The second novel ‘The Titan Probe’ also wasn’t bad. With the ILSE and her crew already at Enceladus the idea of them taking a little side trip to Saturn’s biggest moon Titan made sense and again the life form that they found there, if not as well described as the one on Enceladus, was at least interesting and different. One part of ‘The Titan Probe’ needs to be mentioned. During the story, one of the ILSE crew, the ship’s doctor Marchenko sacrifices himself to save several other crew members but his consciousness is implanted on the ship’s computer by the entity on Enceladus.

The possibility of life on Enceladus has engineers and scientists at NASA already planning for a mission to probe beneath the icy crust of the moon of Saturn. (Credit: Parabolic Arc)

The third novel ‘The Io Encounter’ was a real disappointment. The crew of ILSE are on their way back to Earth when they’re ordered to stop off at Jupiter’s moon Io. Again signs of life have been found there. And while most of the crew are on Io’s surface the ILSE turns back toward Enceladus only to stop halfway there and return to Io!

Jupiter’s moon Io is squeezed and stretched by the immense gravity of Jupiter. This makes Io the most geologically active body in out solar system and hardly a place to find life. (Credit: Astronoo)

All this is completely unrealistic; space missions are planned out years in advance and are simply not equipped for any major changes in trajectory. Having actually calculated a couple of, admittedly rough, space missions I know very well how a side trip another planet is rarely possible. Jupiter could be on the other side of the solar system from Saturn for example, and such changes in the mission would require double the amount of fuel if not much more. In fact the delta Vee needed to go into orbit around Jupiter is really enormous. What had started as a believable SF story had become little more than a cartoon where the laws of physics are ignored. Worse yet, the quality of the story had also suffered.

The starship Enterprise may be able to change course for a new destination at the orders of Captain Kirk but real spaceships require years of planning to accomplish their missions. (Credit: Popular Mechanics)

The fourth novel ‘Return to Enceladus’ is no better. The crew of ILSE are back home on Earth where they get a proposal from an eccentric Russian billionaire who wants them to go back to Enceladus. He is making money by mining near Earth asteroids and is looking to expand his business to the outer solar system. The crew’s reason for going back would be to retrieve the body of their dead comrade Marchenko so that his consciousness can be reinstalled; no description of how this will be done is ever given.

The idea of mining an asteroid has become a common idea in SF stories. It’s probably going to be harder than most people think. (Credit: ExplainingTheFuture.com)

Problem is that the ILSE has been left on a course that will take it to be destroyed in the Sun so the first thing the crew, now joined by the Russian’s daughter, have to do is take one of his ships to rendezvous with the ILSE and stop it from plunging into the Sun. Once on board they set course for Saturn, no mention is made as to how the ship is refueled or resupplied with enough food for a two-year mission.

The idea of downloading a human consciousness onto a computer is also quite old an old one. (Credit: Live Science)

At this point the story becomes a mystery novel as several attempts are made on the lives of different crewpersons and the mission itself. Actually the guilty party is pretty obvious from the start but the crime plot still it takes up half the novel. And when we finally get back to Enceladus the entity there has gone into hiding, it’s now afraid of us, so we don’t even learn more about it.

I have to admit I’m not a fan of murder mysteries in general and adding one to a SF novel is just not a good idea. (Credit: Illinois River Road)

Anyway the whole trip wasn’t worth it in my opinion. The ‘Ice Words’ series by Brandon Q. Morris is just another series of novels that starts out as being fresh and interesting but by the end has just simply run out of steam. ‘Return to Enceladus’ just isn’t a very good SF novel.

Book Review: Why Did the Chicken Cross the World by Andrew Lawler?

Human beings have a tendency to overlook or even ignore those things that are the most familiar to us. Because we see something all of the time we feel as if we know everything there is to know about it, it just isn’t interesting anymore.

The Familiar Barnyard bird. (Credit: IndiaMart)

The chicken has been treated that way throughout history. Entire cultures have been built around cattle or sheep or the bison but not the chicken. Even when a small flock was kept just outside the house for the occasional egg or a special meal it was always the bigger livestock that got all of the attention.

Nevertheless, today it is the chicken that has become humanity’s largest supplier of protein. Today there are more domestic chickens being raised for food than any other animal. The chicken is the greatest success story of the technology of industrial food production, and as a living creature the chief victim of that success.

Andrew Lawler’s book ‘Why did the Chicken Cross the World’ is a journalistic investigation into the chicken, from it’s natural state as a wild bird spread across southern and southeastern Asia to being little more than one of the farmer’s wife’s chores to becoming one of the most valuable industrial commodities on the planet.

Front Cover of ‘Why did the Chicken Cross the World’ by Andrew Lawler (Credit: Amazon)

No one knows when human beings first began to keep the small wild relative of the pheasant but the remains of chickens along with primitive pictograms identified as chickens indicate that our relationship dates back into the Stone Age. The earliest evidence for humans raising and breeding chickens is not for food however, it was for cockfighting.

Wild Chickens still exist in the Kaziranga National Park in India (Credit: Pinterest)

Indeed much of the first third of ‘Why did the Chicken Cross the World’ deals with cockfighting as both a vehicle for gambling but also as a religious ritual! Andrew Lawler presents his evidence in a clear, enjoyable fashion that I quite frankly envy. Traveling around the world Mr. Lawler visits a selection of people who raise roosters for the pit but whose affection for their fighters is much more than just a source of income.

It is likely that Chickens where first domesticated for the fun of watching them fight rather than as a source of food. (Credit: Daily Times)

Moving forward in history Mr. Lawler details how for centuries the chicken competed with ducks and geese, and later the American turkey, for a place in humanity’s farms. It was only in the late 19th and early 20th century that the chicken became the dominant barnyard fowl.

A few centuries ago any barnyard would have kept several species of poultry for food (Credit: MutualArt)

It is the story of how the chicken became the most numerously bred, raised and finally, slaughtered animal that is the main part of ‘Why the Chicken Crossed the World’. Starting about 1850 in England and the US the importation of larger, meatier chickens from Asia began a long term breeding program to produce a chicken that would grow bigger in less time for less feed making chicken more available and less expensive.

Queen Victoria’s Poultry House. It was when Victoria became interested in raising chicken’e that the species became popular in England. (Credit: Poultry Pages)

A key moment came in 1948 when the world’s largest retailer, the A&P supermarket chain joined with the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) to sponsor the ‘Chicken of Tomorrow’ contest. The winner of that contest became the sire of an industrial production line of chickens that grow to more than twice the weight of their wild ancestors. In as little as 47 days modern birds are fully grown at a ratio of one kilo of chicken produced for two kilos of feed, a ratio that is nearly 50% better than any other species of meat producing animal.

The ‘Chicken of Tomorrow’ contest led to the industrialization of raising chickens (Credit: Flashbak)

None of this did the chickens any good. If they are bred for meat they are stuffed by the tens of thousands into industrial sized coops, see image below, where they are fattened up to the point where they can hardly stand. They are allowed to live for less than two months before being slaughtered.

Thousands of Chickens crammed into a modern chicken coop. Is this where your next meal is coming from? (Credit: YouTube)

The Selective breeding of chickens has led to Giant Chickens but at the cost of the animal’s health. (Credit: Insteading)

If they are bred for egg production they are squeezed into a tiny ‘battery cage’, see image. They lay an egg a day on average, a process that takes so much calcium out of their systems that their bones are extremely weak. After a year the hen is so exhausted that she is simply used for dog food.

Egg Laying Chickens in a ‘Battery Cage’. (Credit: Farm Sanctuary)

That’s the hens, the roosters, which are not as valuable and harder to keep because of their tendency to fight, are simply separated from the hens after hatching and disposed of in as cheap a method as possible. To the modern food industry the chicken is no longer a living creature but just another commodity to be produced and packaged cheaply and efficiently.

A motif that Mr. Lawler often returns to is that for millennia the chicken as an animal was a familiar animal. Today it is virtually unknown as a living thing; it is just something we eat, a commodity not a fellow creature.

‘Why the Chicken Crossed the World’ is a thoroughly enjoyable book. A mixture of science, technology, history, sociology and politics in which you find yourself learning something on every page and the knowledge sticks with you. And I’m not just saying that because Andrew Lawler and I share our surname. To be best of my knowledge we are totally unrelated, the book is just really good!

Book Review: Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke award for science fiction book of the year in 2016, ‘Children of Time’ is the first science fiction novel of fantasy author Adrian Tchaikovsky. Receiving an award like the Clarke first time out is quite an achievement so hopefully we’ll be reading a lot more from Mr. Tchaikovsky.

Adrian Tchaikovsky, author of ‘Children of Time’ (Credit: Adria’s News)

‘Children of Time’ begins at least a few hundred years from now. The exact time frame of the novel is never given but humanity has colonized most of the solar system and is starting to Terraform planets around nearby stars so its not in the near future. There is a heated debate however over just how to Terraform these new Earths. There are those who simply believe that Earth’s biosystem, human dominated of course, should be transferred to these new worlds. Others however, feel that these planets should be seeded with life but be allowed to evolve on their own.

Cover of ‘Children of Time’ (Credit: Amazon.com)

Doctor Avrana Kern belongs to the latter group of experimentalists; in fact she is the leader of one such project. The Green World, that’s all it’s ever called in ‘Children of Time’, around which her starship orbits now has a functioning ecology and is ready to receive a collection of primates, ‘monkeys’ who will evolve into the planet’s intelligent masters, or so Kern intends.

Kern has even cooked up a special ‘nanovirus’ that will speed up the evolution of the monkeys! This nanovirus (and aren’t all viruses kind of nano?) is the biggest ‘suspend your belief’ concept in ‘Children of Time’. Designed to work only on primates, not other vertebrates it quickly becomes a ‘deus ex machina’ to solve any plot problems Tchaikovsky encounters in the novel.

‘Deus ex Machina’ or ‘God from a Machine’ has been used to solve plot problems since the days of ancient Greece! (Credit: Writing.stackexchange.com)

Anyway, a mutiny on the starship by the conservatives leads to both the shipment of monkeys and even the ship itself being destroyed. To make matters worse a general war has broken out back on Earth obliterating civilization and leaving the Green World to evolve as it will.

At this point ‘Children of Time’ really breaks into two novels, and at 600 pages it is long enough for two complete novels. One story line involves the evolution of a race of intelligent spiders on the Green World, remember I said the nanovirus doesn’t work on vertebrates other than primates, it works quite well on arthropods however, especially spiders.

What is it about Spiders that People find so frightening? (Credit: Science Explorer)

The second storyline involves a group of the last human survivors from Earth. The planet is now so completed poisoned that the survivors’ only hope is a huge space ark, a sleeper ship with a cargo of thousands of humans in hibernation. The plan is to travel to one of the Terraformed worlds and try to rebuild civilization. Guess which world they’re heading for?

The space ark is involved in several mutinies, a maniac commander and has people popping in and out of hibernation more often than in any story I’ve ever seen. By the end of their several hundred year long journey the ark is barely in working shape, humanity’s only remaining hope is the Green World.

Hibernation is a common plot device in Science Fiction Stories (Credit: Newsnation.in)

The two storylines collide at this point and I’m sure you can guess what the climax consists of. That is the weakest part ‘Children of Time’, after reading one third on the novel you pretty much know how it’s going to end, at least in general terms. Another thing is that nanovirus, for me at least it was just a little too good to be true. It becomes a bit too integral to the development of spider civilization. Finally, after all of the problems that the ark ship encounters during its voyage you can hardly believe it’s working at all by the time it reaches the Green World. Space is a very hostile environment remember!

Still, ‘Children of Time’ was a very interesting read, it managed to keep my attention quite well through its entire 600 pages. I’ll be looking forward to seeing what other science fiction novels Mr. Tchaikovsky comes up with in the future.

Book Review: Freefall by Felix R. Savage. Earth’s Last Gambit Book 1.

‘Freefall’, a novel by author Felix R. Savage is a first contact with aliens story that has a strong dash of a Tom Clancy techno-thriller in it. Just a word of warning however before we start, Freefall is the first in a series of novels, the ‘Earth’s Last Gambit’ series so don’t expect the entire story. In fact ‘Freefall’ only covers the discovery of an alien ship which has entered our solar system and the preparations for an Earth expedition to travel to rendezvous with the aliens.

Freefall by Felix R. Savage (Credit: Good Reads)

Now whenever a science fiction author starts a novel they have to make a decision as to the time period in which the story will be set, present day, near future, far future or even the past (few SF novels are deliberately set in the past).

Author Felix R. Savage (Credit: Amazon UK)

Felix Savage decided to set ‘Freefall’ in the present day and personally I think that’s a dangerous thing to do because as the years go by your novel can quickly become simply wrong! For example in H. G. Wells’ classic ‘The War of the Worlds’ Martians invaded the Earth around the year 1900! Well of course that didn’t actually happen and the fact that every radio broadcast or movie version of the story since it was first published has had to perform a considerable updating illustrates the problem of a story becoming out of date.

Setting your novel in the near future at least gives you some breathing space. When Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey he at least knew that he’d have more than thirty years before the story becomes historically inaccurate. To be completely safe from this problem many novels are set in a distant future, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation stories are an excellent example.

Now don’t get me wrong, I still love both ‘War of the Worlds’ and 2001, but nevertheless I wouldn’t write a story that suffered from this problem before it evens gets published! This is exactly what happens in ‘Freefall’.

‘Freefall’ begins with the final mission of the space shuttle Atlantis in 2011. During the mission Atlantis suffers a collision with apiece of space debris and is so badly damaged that it is unable to land back on Earth. Thanks to the heroism of the pilot however, the shuttle succeeds in reaching the International Space Station so that the crew can be rescued. The shuttle itself however plunges uncontrolled back into Earth’s atmosphere and is destroyed.

Well of course that didn’t happen, the shuttle Atlantis is now a museum exhibit sitting safely at the Kennedy Space Center. But in a sense does historical inaccuracy really matter in a SF novel? Well, I guess you’ll have to decide that for yourself. Once again however, I wouldn’t write a story that I knew would be obsolete before anyone had read it!

The Shuttle Atlantis safely at the Kennedy Space Center (Credit: Wikipedia)

One more little criticism. Since ‘Freefall’ is set in today’s world author Felix Savage decided that allowed him to do a lot of what I call ‘Product Placement’. It seems that every page has one or two references to modern culture, everything from Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups to Jimi Hendrix to the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. Of course it is true that such details can often help an author make their story seem more real but too many can make it feel campy, make it feel as if the author is trying too hard, which can be as bad as not giving enough detail.

All of which is a shame because ‘Freefall’ is an exciting story. It definitely has a bit of the ‘Can’t put it down’ quality to it. Seriously I am looking forward to reading the second installment ‘Lifeboat’ in order to learn something about the aliens. By the way ‘Lifeboat’ is followed by ‘Shiplord’ and the series ends with ‘Killshot’.

Lifeboat by Felix R. Savage Cover (Credit: Amazon)

I’ll be sure to tell you all about it when I do!

Book Review: 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson.

Cover of 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson (Credit: Audiobooks)

Kim Stanley Robinson is an American science fiction author best known for his Mars trilogy (Mars Red, Mars Green and Mars Blue) about the colonization of and terraforming of Mars. “2312” is a recent novel but Robinson is such a prolific writer that he already has a new novel “Aurora” just coming out so you’ll have to forgive me for being a bit behind.

Kim Stanley Robinson (Credit: Davis Enterprise)

As you can guess “2312” takes place three hundred years from now when the human race is well on its way to the complete colonization of the Solar System. Mars has been terraformed and the terraforming of Venus is underway. Meanwhile Mercury and Earth’s Moon along with three of Jupiter’s and two of Saturn’s moons all have substantial population. Not only that but numerous asteroids have been hollowed out and turned into small worldlets, each with its own particular ecosystem. The image below is an artists impression of the interior of such an asteroid.

The Interior of an Asteroid / Worldlet (Credit: Reddit.com)

Swan Er Hong is a citizen of Mercury, an artist and designer of some of the asteroid / worldlets whose grandmother Alex has recently died. In her grandmother’s will Swan is tasked with taking some vital information to several of Alex’s confidants out at Saturn. The information is very sensitive in nature and cannot be trusted to transmission by radio. In carrying out this task Swan becomes involved in a secret organization trying to defend humanity against a conspiracy that threatens the lives of millions.

It’s the actual fight against this conspiracy that is the weakest part of “2312”. Aside from an attack on Mercury’s only city, most of the population manages to escape; the bad guys don’t really do much. In fact it isn’t until you’re 7/8ths of the way through the novel that you can point at someone and say, he’s a bad guy. There’s a lot of theorizing about who the bad guys could be and what their motives are but nothing concrete until near the very end. In fact the motives of the bad guys are never made really clear. And the final defeat of the bad guys itself is rather anti-climatic, the interplanetary police just round them all up in about two pages.

The reason for reading “2312” is all of the descriptions, they are wondrous. In “2312” you get to visit every planet, yes even Pluto, and every one of them is a unique world unto itself. Between Sunwalking on Mercury or surfing the “F” ring of Saturn you’ll read about things you never imagined.

In fact some of the most interesting things are the asteroid / worldlets that I should also mention have been given engines so traveling from one planet to another usually involves jumping on an asteroid that’s going your way. Many of these asteroid / worldlets have ecologies that preserve one of Earth’s damaged ecosystems (Earth is in kinda bad shape). There are other, more interesting worldlets as well however, let’s just say Jurassic Asteroid! The image below shows what such an asteroid could look like from the outside.

An Asteroid Spaceship in 2312 (Credit: Regina Flores Mir)

The people of the early 24th century are also very different as humanity adapts to life in space. Although it’s not mentioned explicitly there must be some kind of gene editing going on. There certainly is with the dinosaurs and woolly mammoths.

Kim Stanley Robinson is a writer best known for his interests in ecology, culture and politics and that’s certainly what you get in “2312”. O’k the plot may be a little thin but think of “2312” as a roller coaster ride, you have a lot of fun so does it really matter if you don’t get very far?

“2312” is like a visit to the early 24th century, that’s something that it does very well.

Book Review: ‘The Glass Universe’ by Dava Sobel

Former New York Times science reporter turned author, Dava Sobel has become a popular advocate for the understanding of science through the telling of it’s history. In her earlier books ‘Longitude’ and ‘Galileo’s Daughter’ Ms. Sobel showed how, through science single individuals could change the world.

In ‘The Glass Universe’ Ms. Sobel tells the story of the female ‘computers’ who worked at the astronomical observatory at Harvard University between the years 1880 and 1950. The contributions of these poorly paid, often ignored and rarely appreciated geniuses played a significant role in shaping the way we view the Universe today.

The Glass Universe cover (Credit: Random House)

Ms. Sobel starts the story with Dr. Henry and Mrs. Anna Draper, amateur astronomers who have taken an interest in two of the cutting edge astronomical techniques of the time, astrophotography and stellar spectra. (Stellar spectra by the way is using a prism to break the light coming from a star into a rainbow, this spectra will show the spectral lines of the elements within that star) Henry Draper had set for himself the task of photographing the spectra of as many stars as he could.

The Drapers contact one of the leading astronomers of the day, Edward Pickering, newly appointed head of Harvard University’s observatory, for advice but Henry Draper died before he could make any real observations. Feeling that she was unable to continue the work herself Anna Draper instead endowed Harvard Observatory, and her friend Dr. Pickering with a generous fund to carry on the work her late husband had hoped to do. In time Mrs. Draper’s generosity will lead to the acquisition of half a million photographic astronomical plates along with the compilation of the all of the data they contain.

Now in the late 19th century a computer was a human being who carried out the drudgery of long mathematical calculations or tabulations. Every scientific labouratory or observatory had at least a few of these computers, who were normally young male students. Harvard observatory however already had a few female computers; they were cheaper than their male counterparts, and with Mrs. Draper’s endowment Pickering hired several more to assist with the recording of the data on all the photographic plates he and the other male astronomers were taking.

Edward Charles Pickering and his Lady ‘Computer’ 1913 (Credit: Racingnelliebly.com)

Before long however, the ladies were making discoveries of their own from within all of the data they were recording. Williamina Fleming for example discovered over three hundred variable stars along with ten novas. Then there was Annie Jump Cannon who in the course of her career analyzed the spectra of more than a million stars and who invented a system for classifying stars that with only a few changes is still in use today.

Also there was my favourite, Henrietta Swam Leavitt who studied those variable stars that exhibited a steady, rhythmic pattern. These stars were called Cepheid variables because the brightest such star in our sky is beta in the constellation Cepheus. In photographic plates from Harvard’s southern hemisphere observatory in Peru Ms. Leavitt discovered about 150 such stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud. By recording the period, maximum and minimum brightness of each of these stars Miss Leavitt uncovered a relation between brightness and period that allowed astronomers to use the Cepheid variables as yardsticks for measuring distances throughout the Milky Way and into other galaxies.

Henrietta Swan Leavitt and her Relationship for Cepheid Variables (Credit: Public Domain)

But don’t get the idea that ‘The Glass Universe’ is only about the female astronomers, we get to meet and learn about some of the best known male astronomers of all time as well. Men like Ejnar Hertzsprung who discovered both giant and dwarf stars and was the first astronomer to use Henrietta Leavitt’s Cepheid yardstick. Or Henry Norris Russell, who studied the composition and evolution of stars. These two men are often thought of as a pair because they both worked, independently on what has become known as the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram of stellar evolution. Then there is Harlow Shapley who became director of Harvard University after the death of Edward Pickering and who used Henrietta Leavitt’s yardstick to determine the size of our Milky Way and our Sun’s position in it.

The Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram. The letters across the bottom are the Stellar Classification Scheme developed by Annie Jump Cannon. (Credit: Cornell.edu)

Then there was Solon Bailey who studied globular clusters. Oh, and I can’t forget Edwin Hubble who used Henrietta’s yardstick (are you getting the idea that Henrietta’s work is really important) to measure the distance to the Andromeda Galaxy, proving that it was outside the Milky Way and a galaxy in its own right.

Still, ‘The Glass Universe’ is really about those poorly paid, often ignored and rarely appreciated geniuses who, as Dava Sobel put it “Took the Measure of the Stars”. I’ve know about these great discoveries, both those by the woman and the men, my entire adult life. For me therefore, the delight in reading ‘The Glass Universe’ was in seeing how all of these scientific advances fitted into one another, how the researchers worked together, or occasionally against each other, to give us a new view of our Universe.

I heartily recommend Dava Sobel’s ‘The Glass Universe’. Without doubt it is one of the best books about science and the way human beings do science that you will ever come across.

Book Review: Death’s End by Cixin Liu, the final book in the Three Body Trilogy.

In my posts of 30Aug2017 and 2May2018 I reviewed the first two installments of Chinese Author Cixin Liu’s trilogy. Part one was ‘The Three Body Problem’ where astrophysicist Ye Wenjie, a victim of Chairman Mao’s cultural revolution who has come to hate humanity, invites an alien race inhabiting the Alpha Centauri system to come and conquer Earth. The aliens are called Trisolarans and since their ship’s are only capable of one percent of the speed of light it will take over 400 years to reach our solar system.

Author Cixin Liu (Credit: Los Angeles Times)

Cover Art for ‘The Three Body Problem’ (Credit: Goodreads)

In the second book of the trilogy ‘The Dark Forest’, astronomer Luo Ji realizes that the Universe is an eternal battleground where intelligent species hide as best they can to escape being destroyed by some other intelligence, hence the ‘Dark Forest’. Luo Ji uses this knowledge to force the Trisolarans into a Mexican standoff, ‘If you try to invade us we’ll announce your coordinates to the entire Galaxy and someone out there will destroy you pretty quickly’. The novel ends with the Trisolarans agreeing to a truce.

Cover Art for ‘The dark Forest’ (Credit: China Underground)

The third novel, ‘Death’s End’ actually begins in the year 1453 C.E. with the Turkish army about to conquer Constantinople. A witch tells Byzantine Emperor Constantine IX that she can kill the Sultan with her magic. To test her the Emperor commands her to kill a condemned prisoner even while he is under constant guard. When the prisoner magically falls down dead in front of the guards and the witch brings the Emperor the man’s brain even though his head is completely untouched she is ordered to assassinate the Turkish Sultan. Two days later she announces that her magic has failed and she no longer has any power so she is executed even as the Turkish army breaks into the city.

I when into some detail on this initial section of ‘Death’s End’ because I succeeded in figuring out what the witch’s power was and I had a good idea how it was going to effect the rest of the novel. See if you can figure it out as well!

The main character in ‘Death’s End’ is aerospace engineer Cheng Xin. Cheng is the person who has been selected to replace Luo Ji as the ‘Swordholder’, the person holding the switch that if pressed will broadcast the position of the Trisolarans to the dark forest. Since making such an announcement would not only give away the position of the Trisolarans but of Humanity as well it would lead to the mutual destruction of both civilizations.

Cover Art for ‘Death’s End’ (Credit :Amazon)

It’s during the hand-off that the Trisolarans attempt to break the deadlock but I think I’ll forego any more spoilers. Let’s just say that some members of both species do survive to build new civilizations.

If the first two novels of the trilogy were inventive and imaginative ‘Death’s end’ squares the breathtaking vision of a Universe beyond the imagination. That’s not quite a good thing however, for in his rush to include ideas like mini-Universes, weaponized dimensions and space curvature as a way to both achieve lightspeed and alter the speed of light Cixin Liu leaves a lot of loose threads behind in his story. Now every novel has a few question left unanswered at the end but “Death’s End’ just has too many. At the end I was left asking a lot of, ‘well what about?’ and ‘what happened to?’

Also, if Cixin Liu wanted to show off his imagination he could have tried actually describing what the Trisolarans looked like! The three novels are more than a combined 1500 pages but we never get to see the bad guys! Now I know how difficult it can be to describe really alien creatures, in fact I’m halfway through a novel with very alien intelligences in it and I’m nowhere near satisfied with my descriptions so far. I can see the aliens in my head but getting that image onto paper is really tough!

Most Aliens are portrayed in fiction as nothing more than weird looking Humans. (Credit: Futurism)

Nevertheless Cixin Liu needed to try. At the end of ‘The Three Body Problem’ I accepted that we hadn’t seen the Trisolarans yet, there fleet is still 400 years away after all. Nevertheless I expected to see them in ‘The Dark Forest’. I have to admit by the end of ‘Death’s End’ I kinda felt cheated.

Nevertheless, ‘Death’s End’ was a real eye opener, a wild ride through a fantastic Universe that will stick in your mind and leave you thinking and wondering for days. In all the ‘Three Body Trilogy’ was some of the best science fiction I’ve read in quite a few years and I hope to soon read some more of Cixin Liu’s work.

Book Review “Galactic Satori Chronicles, Book 1: EARTH” by Nick Braker and Paul E Hicks

This post is going to be a little bit different from my usual literary critiques because the novel “Galactic Satori Chronicles, Book 1: EARTH” (which I will refer to as GSC1E from now on) is a self published work that as far as I know is only available at Amazon or from the authors themselves. As it happens I met Nick Braker in Sweetwater Tennessee when I was there for the eclipse back in August (see post of 24Aug17), bought the novel and finally got around to reading it. The novel’s cover is shown below.

Cover, Galactic Satori Chronicles, Book 1: EARTH (Credit: Nick Braker, Paul E Hicks)

Let me start by saying that GSC1E is pretty much written to appeal to the fans of “The X Files” or UFO conspiracies in general. There are three distinct alien species, one good and two bad, men in black along with secret sites around the world where alien technology is being studied. All three alien species abduct humans, the good aliens do so to ‘augment’ four woman and four men, the bad aliens either swap minds with humans in a plot to destroy mankind while the other bad aliens are harvesting our organs!

The heroes of GSC1E are the eight augmented men and women and one man in particular, Asher. Together the eight have to learn to use their enhanced powers to stop bad aliens number one before they can kill us all. We’re not talking about thought provoking Science Fiction here; the plot of GSC1E is actually more like a Wild West shoot’em up. There are in fact plenty of flight scenes, with both fists and guns, along with almost as many chases.

The problem is GSC1E isn’t really very well written. In many places the plot and descriptions border on the juvenal. For example all the women in the novel are absolutely ravishing, every single one of them. Even the head of the World Security Organization the WSO is breathtakingly beautiful. The WSO is the official name of the men in black by the way. On the other hand the men are all filled to the brim with testosterone, so much so that after a while I wanted to yell at them to grow up. Really, people insulting and threatening each other all the time is not a sign of affection, it’s just bad dialog.

At the start of the story bad aliens number one have murdered Asher’s fiancée Beth and he swears revenge. For the rest of the novel we’re reminded every four or five pages of how much Beth meant to him, how no other women will ever take her place and how he will avenge her. Despite these reminders Asher still manages to hit on every, and I do mean every women in the book. It just doesn’t work, not very well anyway.

Then there was one episode, about three quarters of the way through the book where they just lost me completely. The four augmented men are now full fledged members of the WSO and they’re on a mission to France to investigate a series of murders by aliens in that country. A computer analysis of the murders points to a suburb of Paris and so they decide to drive around until they find someone who’s been abducted by aliens. Seriously, they decide to drive around in order to find an alien abductee, and the worst part is two paragraphs later they just find one! Now I know every novel has it’s ‘Oh, Come On’ moments. The moments when something happens that’s a little hard to believe and you say to yourself ‘Oh, Come On’ but for me that moment was just too much to take.

I tried to be generous, after all not everybody has my taste and if I think anyone might like a book I’ll try to point out it’s good parts for them. However ‘Galactic Satori Chronicles, Book 1: EARTH’ had a high school plot along with writing that could really have used some serious editing, maybe that’s the penalty for self-publishing. Still, if you think you might be interested in reading ‘Galactic Satori Chronicles, Book 1: EARTH’ click on the link below to be taken to the author’s webpage.

https://www.nickbraker.net/

Book Review: Death Wave by Ben Bova

Anyone familiar with Science Fiction knows that Ben Bova is SF royalty. Author of over hundred fiction and non-fiction books Ben Bova has received six Hugo awards, been the editor of both Analog and Omni science fiction magazines as well as a being a former President of the Science Fiction Writers of America. I need to take a breath after all that.

Death Wave is Bova’s latest title; actually he’s so prolific I may already be wrong about that. Death wave is a sequel to his earlier novel New Earth so I’ll have to catch you up on what happened in that story.

Death Wave by Ben Bova (Credit Tor Books)

Jorden Kell is the leader of humanity’s first expedition into interstellar space. The expedition finds the dead remains of alien civilizations, their planets sterilized by a wave of gamma radiation that has erupted out of the black hole at the center of our Galaxy.

Only a race of machine intelligences has managed to survive and they warn Jorden Kell and his crew that the Death Wave will reach Earth in 2000 years. The machine intelligences also give Kell the necessary knowledge to produce a force field type technology that can protect us from the Death Wave. In exchange for this assistance humanity is to send space missions to six nearby intelligent but pre-industrial alien species in order to protect them.

All that is back story to “Death Wave” which begins when Jorden Kell and several other members of his expedition have returned to Earth and try to convince the governments of the World of the danger to Earth and the nearby civilizations. But 200 years have passed since the astronauts departed on their mission and the World is not the one they left.

In particular Anita Halleck, the Chairwoman of the World Council is too busy trying to bring all of the Solar System’s bureaucracies under her control to concern herself with a threat to humanity 2000 years in the future, or any threat to alien civilizations at all. What does concern Halleck is her suspicions that Jorden Kell is trying to use his notoriety to supplant her, something she will prevent at any cost.

Add in terrorists who believe Jorden Kell is actually paving the way for an alien invasion, security personnel who do the Chairwoman’s very dirty work and a trip to an orbiting habitat for 200,000 humans and you get a pretty wild escape story. The problem is that most of the science fiction is actually left over from the first novel leaving “Death Wave” with little more than political machinations and a good chase sequence.

I don’t want to give away too much but I think that even Ben Bova felt that way because the ending comes as a bit of a letdown. The bad guys get the drop on the good guys then good guys turn the tables and it’s over!

I’m not saying “Death Wave” wasn’t good. In fact it was quite exciting. It just wasn’t as interesting as “New Earth”. There is a third novel coming in the series, “Apes and Angels” which may already be available. This third novel is going to follow one of the expeditions to rescue the alien civilizations and I think there will be more SF in it. I’ll be certain to let you know after I read it!