Strive with Your Last Ounce of Courage to Reach the Unreachable Planet
Written: Dec 11 '05
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Product Rating:
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Pros: good idea-driven book, interesting alternate anti-neutrino-based universe, builds up political tension
Cons: somewhat two-dimensional characters, ending does quite fit, a few minor quibbles with the science
The Bottom Line: The Wreath of Stars doesn't quite reach its full potential but it succeeds in presenting a grand idea with great scope within a context plausible as a near future existence.
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| quasar's Full Review: A Wreath of Stars Books |
Gilbert Snook thinks of himself as a neutrino. He's just passing through this world, interacting with no one, on a straight line from his birth to his death. All of that changes with the discovery of Thornton's Planet, a strange world of anti-neutrinos fast approaching Earth that, for some unknown reason, doesn't pass right through our Hadrionic universe on a straight line. Thornton's Planet, visible only through special night vision glasses with higher-than-normal neutrino collection capabilities, winds up orbiting our Sun. In four orbits it will come our way again and actually pass through the Earth.
Gilbert is an airplane engineer, sort of a glorified mechanic. He's spent much of his life wandering around the Middle East and Africa working for anyone who had a fleet of airplanes that needed servicing and was willing to pay well. When Thornton's Planet causes rioting among the natives of his current home, he winds up flying out with Chuck Charlton. Charlton buys his way to a cushy life by landing their plane in a newly formed African dictatorship. Gilbert refuses to service the plane for them. He's stopped from leaving the country and forced to work as the teacher at a local government run mine.
It's been three years since Thornton's Planet passed closest to Earth, three years of exile for Gilbert. He finds a sort of satisfaction in his teaching duties, thanks in large part to the plentiful supply of coffee and alcohol. He's growing to know some of his students, growing to accept the life he didn't choose but that isn't too terribly taxing. Then one day one of his students sees a ghost in the mine and everything changes again.
To save money, the mines are run in almost total darkness. Night vision glasses - those same glasses that helped discover Thornton's Planet - are standard issue tools of the trade. These ghosts - ethereal beings that float up from within the rocks then float back down - are not otherworldly or drunken imaginings but people from a world made of anti-neutrinos, a world found within our own.
The passing of Thornton's Planet had no real effect on our own, but it devastated the anti-neutrino world, killing a large portion of its inhabitants, changing the tides, and generally creating havoc. Scientist Boyce Ambrose is first to figure this out, to realize what the ghost sightings really mean. Together with Gilbert and several others, he devises a way to communicate with the inhabitants of the anti-neutrino world. They make plans to attempt to transfer one of the anti-neutrino people to our universe but time is running out. The political situation is becoming dire and the local dictator is losing patience with these foreigners who don't automatically conform to his every whim. Will they finish the experiment before they're kicked out or killed? What will they find even if they do? Are the two worlds even compatible? Read the book and find out.
I read A Wreath of Stars by Bob Shaw because some other book or article I read recently cited it alongside Isaac Asimov's The Gods Themselves as the best examples of alien life based on wholly non-human origins and characteristics. I didn't know how it could possibly live up to that billing - Asimov's Soft Ones are by far the best non-humanoid aliens ever put to the page - but I was willing to be surprised.
The anti-neutrino people of The Wreath of Stars don't live up to that billing, but in part that's because this book is not terribly character driven. The interesting things here are ideas and setting, not character. The science itself is both intriguing and unusual; the idea of an anti-neutrino universe coexisting with our own and only known to us because of a side effect of technology devised for other use is compelling. The politics of the fractured off African dictatorship, while predictable and not terribly original, provide most of the tension in the story and keep events moving along. The people are somewhat two-dimensional, not portrayed badly but rarely seen except for their precise role in this exact story; there's little character development or background and it's not uncommon for characters who seem like they might be central or at least interesting to show up for a few pages then disappear forever.
As an idea book, The Wreath of Stars works. It's fairly well written and decently plotted, although the ending is just a bit contrived and not quite suited to the setup that precedes it. The visuals and exact way our world physically corresponds to the anti-neutrino world coexisting in the same spot can be somewhat difficult to parse, particularly when Shaw goes off on the few longer expository bits meant to lay out future events. I didn't quite follow all of it and it didn't always follow logically from particle physics as we know it, but it did seem mostly self-consistent. None of the technical and scientific lapses were so severe as to ruin the book.
The Wreath of Stars doesn't quite reach its full potential but it succeeds in presenting a grand idea with great scope within a context plausible as a near future existence. It's not in the same class as The Gods Themselves (what is?) but it's not trying to be the same type of book so that's okay. The aliens are important only as a realization and implication of the science which is the entire point of this book. Really hard core science fiction fans might question a few of the implications drawn from the scientific detail presented within, but most fans of idea-driven science fiction will find a lot to like here.
Recommended:
Yes
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