Hello Folks,
Well, we had a smaller than usual turnout at our most recent meeting. Bad
weather kept some of our regulars offline. But everyone who was able to make it
liked our book, Ventus by Karl Schroeder. For our next book, we’ve selected a
tale of first contact by one of the best author collaborations in SF history:
We’ve chose The Mote in God’s Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.
The next meeting of the Science Fiction club will be on Thursday, July 9, 2015.
Place: Book Nook at:
http://conference321.com/masteradmin/room.asp?id=rs7867a2369e0e
Time: 9 PM Eastern, 8 PM Central, 7 PM Mountain, 6 PM Pacific, and 01:00 UTC.
Our book, The Mote in God’s Eye is available from both BARD and Bookshare.
The Bookshare version is at:
https://www.bookshare.org/browse/book/29134
and the link to the downloadable BARD version is at:
http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.nls/db.45438
The NLS annotation reads as follows:
In the thirty-first century, humans make initial contact with another
intelligent species. Though the aliens seem candid, they may be concealing
their true and dangerously cunning nature.
Here is a review from Amazon’s page for Mote:
Amazon.com Review
In the year 3016, the Second Empire of Man spans hundreds of star systems,
thanks
to the faster-than-light Alderson Drive. No other intelligent beings have ever
been
encountered, not until a light sail probe enters a human system carrying a dead
alien.
The probe is traced to the Mote, an isolated star in a thick dust cloud, and an
expedition
is dispatched.
In the Mote the humans find an ancient civilization--at least one million years
old--that has always been bottled up in their cloistered solar system for lack
of
a star drive. The Moties are welcoming and kind, yet rather evasive about
certain
aspects of their society. It seems the Moties have a dark problem, one they've
been
unable to solve in over a million years.
This is the first collaboration between Niven and Pournelle, two masters of hard
science fiction, and it combines Pournelle's interest in the military and
sociology
with Niven's talent for creating interesting, believable aliens. The novel
meticulously
examines every aspect of First Contact, from the Moties' biology, society, and
art,
to the effects of the meeting on humanity's economics, politics, and religions.
And
all the while suspense builds as we watch the humans struggle toward the truth.
--Brooks Peck
Come join us next month to talk about what many consider one of the best first
contact novels ever written, and anything else SF literature related.
Evan
