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The Makers Series #1
Life Probe
In the twenty-first century, a space probe lands on Earth in search of help for the inhabitants of a distant planet
297 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published May 12, 1983
13 people are currently reading
190 people want to read
About the author
Michael McCollum
54 books100 followersMichael McCollum was born in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1946, and is a graduate of Arizona State University, where he majored in aerospace propulsion and minored in nuclear engineering. He is employed at Honeywell in Tempe, Arizona, where he is Chief Engineer in the valve product line. In his career, Mr. McCollum has worked on the precursor to the Space Shuttle Main Engine, a nuclear valve to replace the one that failed at Three Mile Island, several guided missiles, Space Station Freedom, and virtually every aircraft in production today. He is currently involved in an effort to create a joint venture company with a major Russian aerospace engine manufacturer and has traveled extensively to Russia in the last several years. In addition to his engineering, Mr. McCollum is a successful professional writer in the field of science fiction. He is the author of a dozen pieces of short fiction and has appeared in magazines such as Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, Amazing, and Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. Mr. McCollum is married to a lovely lady named Catherine, and has three children: Robert, Michael, and Elizabeth.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
July 2, 2012
i was pleasantly suprised by this one. Essentially it's a first contact novel, but very scientifically plausible. The author has great street creds and has written stories for Analog, Asimov's etc. so I kind of knew what to expect when I began. But what I didn't expect (and was happy to see) were fairly robust, fleshed out characters. Their interaction really drove the story beyond the science of it all. There was also some exploration of social issues and ramifications of the discovery of intelligent life beyond our planet; i.e religion, international competition, and even racial issues. These were really just touched on, not deeply developed, and not getting in the way of the actual story.
This is the first of a two-parter, with the sequel, Procyon's Promise waiting in my wings.
This is the first of a two-parter, with the sequel, Procyon's Promise waiting in my wings.
Read
July 25, 2012There are, as has been pointed out, other first contact books. Many are better, many much worse. This one, though set in the late 21st century (though I seriously doubt whether there will ever be a Queen Victoria III, for a start. Victoria herself put the kibosh on either another queen whose reign name was Victoria, or any king whatever with the reign name Albert.), has the sensibilities of the late 1970s, mostly. And it keeps assumptions common from earlier times.
This is a serious problem. The question of scientific accuracy is a complex one. The engineering aspects and the physics are probably accurate, though there are some limitations. The society PROBE comes from could quite easily inhabit neighboring star systems without an FTL drive. How? Well, they might try the methods suggested in The Millenium Project. They might benefit from the ideas therein even if they don't travel outside their own star system, because the implication in the book is that they haven't moved into interplanetary space with habitats, on any scale, at least.
But leaving aside the 'hard' sciences, it's obvious that the author is not at all cognizant of social sciences. Why would anyone believe that all 'civilized' worlds had only one language?
Any book that starts with the argument that Homo erectus ever became 'lord of the Earth' is already, as someone once said, walking over thin ice to quicksand. Homo erectus populations spread from Africa into large parts of Eurasia. They even got as far afield as Indonesia, which was probably more accessible when seas were shallower during the Ice Ages. They were never 'lords' of any place. It's not clear what their religious beliefs were, but they probably would have thought the very idea impious.
So far, this is neither a very good nor a very bad book. One can foresee problems that might develop. But I doubt that the development with either raise or lower the quality of the book much.
And so? What kind of world doesn't have room for mundane art? It's probably going to be quite adequate. And after a little waffling at first, there do seem to be some characters developing, which is a plus.
I would like to know more about the personality of PROBE, though. Ok, it comes from a very old and cautious society. And it's likely fairly cautious personally, as well. But what are its philosophical underpinnings? It's analyzing a lot of data in a very short time (too short, really. There's no real reason to believe that an intelligent machine would be able to think that much faster than an organic being). But there's little information supplied about how it organizes and interprets those data. It's hard to believe that a very old society would subscribe to a unilinear theory of societal development. It always worries me when 'civilized' is used as the ultimate compliment. And when terms related to personal development (such as 'adolescent') and judgmental terms (such as 'primitive' or 'savage') are used, the worry about the Makers' society deepens. I also don't care much for blanket statements like that humans generally respond to any problem with a militaristic 'solution'. No, they don't. Some segments of human societies might. But most, in fact, do not.
I think the estimate of the number of intelligent species may be too high. Earth is an n of one, but only a few tens of species would qualify as intelligent on Earth by most measures: and some people might argue that only humans and their (now extinct) hominid kin really qualify.
I don't like the argument that most humans are innumerate by choice. I've always argued that the innumeracy is almost entirely externally imposed. Most infants and small children are extremely curious, and have no reluctance to learn scientific lore. Far from it; until they enter into formal schooling, children are mostly 'students' in the original sense: eager and excited to learn. They are TAUGHT not to like sciences, mathematics etc by bad teaching that privileges the tedious, makes learning a chore, and tries to substitute memorization for true learning. Blaming victims of that sort of programming for remaining true to their salt is compounding the failure.
We'll see how this goes on. Maybe the flaws will be alleviated somewhat, as PROBE becomes more familiar with the persons, rather than theorizing from stereotypes. And maybe the humans will be able to at least alleviate their paranoid xenophobia, and learn to accept the existence of friendly or even just neutral and normally variable aliens. It's not promising so far, but after all that may be the point of the story; to proceed from unpromising beginnings to a win-win situation.
Ok, finished now. There are several problems I raised that were resolved. Others were not. So for simplicity, I'll just deal with the ones that weren't resolved as if for the first time.
So to begin with, the idea that the human psyche is grounded in fear is simply absurd. I suggest paying attention to the education of SURROGATE, to recognize what is conspicuously left out. It's not perhaps surprising that the concepts of kith and kin are left unresolved, given that PROBE seems to be somewhat deficient in the concept of loyalty to any group smaller than a species. But it creates significant misunderstandings.
Based on this assumption of fundamental fear, which is also held by too many humans (indeed, PROBE comes to this misapprehension largely because the popular literature it has access to has little content from, say, professional journals), there's too much of a cold-war type policy of keeping vital information secret from the general public, and preventing ordinary people from educating themselves, thus creating a self-fulfilling prophecy in which the average people, knowing that they're being lied to, fear that they're not being told other things which would frighten them even more, and so doubt even honest reporting. It's not surprising that there are riots among the people misinformed as a matter of policy. Or that rather than come clean, and give the 'rioters' the chance to correct their misapprehensions, the riots are simply ruthlessly suppressed.
Second, humans are NOT 'carnivores'. They never have been, and they never will be. Humans are OMNIVORES. But they're predominantly herbivorous in almost all cases. Only a few societies worldwide have had a predominantly meat-based diet. In most societies the vegetable foodstuffs have rarely exceed 30% of the diet. The few exceptions (such as the Inuit, historically), were not generally violent interpersonally. The Inuit, for example, lived in a very hostile environment, with small numbers and very sophisticated technology (there are whole monographs, for example, on women's knives). They couldn't afford warfare or even feuds; so they developed an elaborate conflict resolution process based on song duels.
Nor are humans 'hunters'. Traditional human societies (which are almost entirely extinct by now) were almost entirely based on GATHERING, not hunting. You would think that a society that has become much more egalitarian on gender grounds than present-day societies (though still not at parity by any means) would have incorporated 'women's work' and 'women's thinking' into its institutions. Unfortunately, what seems to have happened instead is that the women have fallen into the kind of thinking that Remington Steele decried at one point: "That a woman with intelligence, determination, and a certain amount of training can be as stupidly macho as any man." This is, granted, not a healthy basis for a society: but I don't think it's a particularly likely route for future development of human societies, either.
I also note a degree of what turned out to be unjustified pessimism about the inevitability of nuclear war. There's a subtext of arguing for the militarization of space. The conceit is that only military spacecraft prevented the 'Misfire War' from becoming a total holocaust, though at horrendous cost. The exhibition one of the characters is shown of the horrors of nuclear bombings is effective on her: but why hadn't she seen such things before? I have personally seen many such exhibitions. They exist. Why aren't they widely known in the society depicted?
And it's noteworthy that the threats to PROBE and its advocates ALSO come as a result of the militarization of space travel. The argument seems to be that space weapons need to be kept 'out of the wrong hands'. Whenever I hear this line of argument, I reflexively respond "ANY hands are the wrong hands". The particular hands in this case are irrelevant. The assumption that only the 'Pan-Africans' (this seems to be mostly a union of sub-Saharan states) harbor this sort of irrational resentment (resentment becomes irrational when the rational basis is removed, and yet people cling to their grievances, rather than undertaking rational methods of clearing old debts and recouping institutional inequalities) is more than a little absurd, and is not consistent with developments in indigenous rights movements, either by the time of the book's writing or since.
The descriptions of spaceborne communities are seriously lacking. For example, there's some suggestion that there are farms, etc in habitats. But there doesn't seem to be enough vegetation aboard the ships, nor much evidence of animal and insect life in spacecraft. But there must be such things. What, no ship's cats? No pollinators?
And while there's some indication of specialized space holidays (mostly called 'Mardi Gras'), there's no real discussion of how things are scheduled in space. There's a statement that humans have not made any adjustment to the lack of circadian cues in space. In nearly a century? There are adjustments already being made. And not just in space. And there would likely be other developments. None of the characters in the story were born in space, except possibly the child character Lisa, who appears and disappears unaccountably. There must be more people born off Earth, by this time, but they're not visible, and apparently they have no representation in the retooled 'UN'. And why would a groundhog argue that a permanent emigrant must be 'patriotic' towards a homeland he's abandoned?
PROBE itself makes serious mistakes. It's not that I expect it to be omniscient. If the Makers were omniscient, they wouldn't need to send out probes. I just would hope it would be more parsimonious. Why didn't PROBE make copies of its library and stash them various places, while retaining keys for bargaining purposes? Even if it didn't anticipate mayhem, there are always cosmic dangers probes would encounter pretty often. People who obviously understand the concept of redundancy should have sent at least three probes to each of their routes. But at the very least, the probes should make copies of their databases and distribute them along the inbound route. It shouldn't be that difficult. Not half so difficult as the process of creating SURROGATE. Why didn't PROBE even think of such an elementary precaution?
Hints of the Pathfinder project begin in the first chapter, but it's not really a spoiler to argue that humanity might be expected to create successors to PROBE. This must have been part of the Makers' plans for all the probes. I do somewhat resent the argument that humans could not be expected to do such a thing through altruism. The current denigration of altruism is more than a little disturbing to me. But I don't see why the author OR the Makers would think it would be necessary to beat humanity's heads against the wall to convince them that it's necessary to travel beyond the Solar System if the human species is going to survive in the long term. This is axiomatic, since there's no guarantee that even if humans spread throughout the Solar System, they'll be safe from widespread disasters (such as local stars going nova). The long term lack of resources won't become a serious problem for quite some time yet, but the risks from disasters are current...but aren't mentioned at all.
This is a serious problem. The question of scientific accuracy is a complex one. The engineering aspects and the physics are probably accurate, though there are some limitations. The society PROBE comes from could quite easily inhabit neighboring star systems without an FTL drive. How? Well, they might try the methods suggested in The Millenium Project. They might benefit from the ideas therein even if they don't travel outside their own star system, because the implication in the book is that they haven't moved into interplanetary space with habitats, on any scale, at least.
But leaving aside the 'hard' sciences, it's obvious that the author is not at all cognizant of social sciences. Why would anyone believe that all 'civilized' worlds had only one language?
Any book that starts with the argument that Homo erectus ever became 'lord of the Earth' is already, as someone once said, walking over thin ice to quicksand. Homo erectus populations spread from Africa into large parts of Eurasia. They even got as far afield as Indonesia, which was probably more accessible when seas were shallower during the Ice Ages. They were never 'lords' of any place. It's not clear what their religious beliefs were, but they probably would have thought the very idea impious.
So far, this is neither a very good nor a very bad book. One can foresee problems that might develop. But I doubt that the development with either raise or lower the quality of the book much.
And so? What kind of world doesn't have room for mundane art? It's probably going to be quite adequate. And after a little waffling at first, there do seem to be some characters developing, which is a plus.
I would like to know more about the personality of PROBE, though. Ok, it comes from a very old and cautious society. And it's likely fairly cautious personally, as well. But what are its philosophical underpinnings? It's analyzing a lot of data in a very short time (too short, really. There's no real reason to believe that an intelligent machine would be able to think that much faster than an organic being). But there's little information supplied about how it organizes and interprets those data. It's hard to believe that a very old society would subscribe to a unilinear theory of societal development. It always worries me when 'civilized' is used as the ultimate compliment. And when terms related to personal development (such as 'adolescent') and judgmental terms (such as 'primitive' or 'savage') are used, the worry about the Makers' society deepens. I also don't care much for blanket statements like that humans generally respond to any problem with a militaristic 'solution'. No, they don't. Some segments of human societies might. But most, in fact, do not.
I think the estimate of the number of intelligent species may be too high. Earth is an n of one, but only a few tens of species would qualify as intelligent on Earth by most measures: and some people might argue that only humans and their (now extinct) hominid kin really qualify.
I don't like the argument that most humans are innumerate by choice. I've always argued that the innumeracy is almost entirely externally imposed. Most infants and small children are extremely curious, and have no reluctance to learn scientific lore. Far from it; until they enter into formal schooling, children are mostly 'students' in the original sense: eager and excited to learn. They are TAUGHT not to like sciences, mathematics etc by bad teaching that privileges the tedious, makes learning a chore, and tries to substitute memorization for true learning. Blaming victims of that sort of programming for remaining true to their salt is compounding the failure.
We'll see how this goes on. Maybe the flaws will be alleviated somewhat, as PROBE becomes more familiar with the persons, rather than theorizing from stereotypes. And maybe the humans will be able to at least alleviate their paranoid xenophobia, and learn to accept the existence of friendly or even just neutral and normally variable aliens. It's not promising so far, but after all that may be the point of the story; to proceed from unpromising beginnings to a win-win situation.
Ok, finished now. There are several problems I raised that were resolved. Others were not. So for simplicity, I'll just deal with the ones that weren't resolved as if for the first time.
So to begin with, the idea that the human psyche is grounded in fear is simply absurd. I suggest paying attention to the education of SURROGATE, to recognize what is conspicuously left out. It's not perhaps surprising that the concepts of kith and kin are left unresolved, given that PROBE seems to be somewhat deficient in the concept of loyalty to any group smaller than a species. But it creates significant misunderstandings.
Based on this assumption of fundamental fear, which is also held by too many humans (indeed, PROBE comes to this misapprehension largely because the popular literature it has access to has little content from, say, professional journals), there's too much of a cold-war type policy of keeping vital information secret from the general public, and preventing ordinary people from educating themselves, thus creating a self-fulfilling prophecy in which the average people, knowing that they're being lied to, fear that they're not being told other things which would frighten them even more, and so doubt even honest reporting. It's not surprising that there are riots among the people misinformed as a matter of policy. Or that rather than come clean, and give the 'rioters' the chance to correct their misapprehensions, the riots are simply ruthlessly suppressed.
Second, humans are NOT 'carnivores'. They never have been, and they never will be. Humans are OMNIVORES. But they're predominantly herbivorous in almost all cases. Only a few societies worldwide have had a predominantly meat-based diet. In most societies the vegetable foodstuffs have rarely exceed 30% of the diet. The few exceptions (such as the Inuit, historically), were not generally violent interpersonally. The Inuit, for example, lived in a very hostile environment, with small numbers and very sophisticated technology (there are whole monographs, for example, on women's knives). They couldn't afford warfare or even feuds; so they developed an elaborate conflict resolution process based on song duels.
Nor are humans 'hunters'. Traditional human societies (which are almost entirely extinct by now) were almost entirely based on GATHERING, not hunting. You would think that a society that has become much more egalitarian on gender grounds than present-day societies (though still not at parity by any means) would have incorporated 'women's work' and 'women's thinking' into its institutions. Unfortunately, what seems to have happened instead is that the women have fallen into the kind of thinking that Remington Steele decried at one point: "That a woman with intelligence, determination, and a certain amount of training can be as stupidly macho as any man." This is, granted, not a healthy basis for a society: but I don't think it's a particularly likely route for future development of human societies, either.
I also note a degree of what turned out to be unjustified pessimism about the inevitability of nuclear war. There's a subtext of arguing for the militarization of space. The conceit is that only military spacecraft prevented the 'Misfire War' from becoming a total holocaust, though at horrendous cost. The exhibition one of the characters is shown of the horrors of nuclear bombings is effective on her: but why hadn't she seen such things before? I have personally seen many such exhibitions. They exist. Why aren't they widely known in the society depicted?
And it's noteworthy that the threats to PROBE and its advocates ALSO come as a result of the militarization of space travel. The argument seems to be that space weapons need to be kept 'out of the wrong hands'. Whenever I hear this line of argument, I reflexively respond "ANY hands are the wrong hands". The particular hands in this case are irrelevant. The assumption that only the 'Pan-Africans' (this seems to be mostly a union of sub-Saharan states) harbor this sort of irrational resentment (resentment becomes irrational when the rational basis is removed, and yet people cling to their grievances, rather than undertaking rational methods of clearing old debts and recouping institutional inequalities) is more than a little absurd, and is not consistent with developments in indigenous rights movements, either by the time of the book's writing or since.
The descriptions of spaceborne communities are seriously lacking. For example, there's some suggestion that there are farms, etc in habitats. But there doesn't seem to be enough vegetation aboard the ships, nor much evidence of animal and insect life in spacecraft. But there must be such things. What, no ship's cats? No pollinators?
And while there's some indication of specialized space holidays (mostly called 'Mardi Gras'), there's no real discussion of how things are scheduled in space. There's a statement that humans have not made any adjustment to the lack of circadian cues in space. In nearly a century? There are adjustments already being made. And not just in space. And there would likely be other developments. None of the characters in the story were born in space, except possibly the child character Lisa, who appears and disappears unaccountably. There must be more people born off Earth, by this time, but they're not visible, and apparently they have no representation in the retooled 'UN'. And why would a groundhog argue that a permanent emigrant must be 'patriotic' towards a homeland he's abandoned?
PROBE itself makes serious mistakes. It's not that I expect it to be omniscient. If the Makers were omniscient, they wouldn't need to send out probes. I just would hope it would be more parsimonious. Why didn't PROBE make copies of its library and stash them various places, while retaining keys for bargaining purposes? Even if it didn't anticipate mayhem, there are always cosmic dangers probes would encounter pretty often. People who obviously understand the concept of redundancy should have sent at least three probes to each of their routes. But at the very least, the probes should make copies of their databases and distribute them along the inbound route. It shouldn't be that difficult. Not half so difficult as the process of creating SURROGATE. Why didn't PROBE even think of such an elementary precaution?
Hints of the Pathfinder project begin in the first chapter, but it's not really a spoiler to argue that humanity might be expected to create successors to PROBE. This must have been part of the Makers' plans for all the probes. I do somewhat resent the argument that humans could not be expected to do such a thing through altruism. The current denigration of altruism is more than a little disturbing to me. But I don't see why the author OR the Makers would think it would be necessary to beat humanity's heads against the wall to convince them that it's necessary to travel beyond the Solar System if the human species is going to survive in the long term. This is axiomatic, since there's no guarantee that even if humans spread throughout the Solar System, they'll be safe from widespread disasters (such as local stars going nova). The long term lack of resources won't become a serious problem for quite some time yet, but the risks from disasters are current...but aren't mentioned at all.
January 15, 2019
As a space opera thriller, with sufficient suspension of disbelief and ignorance of international stereotyping, I rate this 4 stars.
There are some grossly implausible tech developments and astonishing incompetence by at least two major players in their own fields of specialty or sub-specialty. One major unlikely event, tech development, or blunder, or even two, are plausible because that happens in real life, but not so many.
The author's selection of good folks, and folks, and bad folks who are not criticized leaves a lot to be desired, as it reinforces the propaganda used by first and second world nations to subjugate and maim so many third world nations.
There are some grossly implausible tech developments and astonishing incompetence by at least two major players in their own fields of specialty or sub-specialty. One major unlikely event, tech development, or blunder, or even two, are plausible because that happens in real life, but not so many.
The author's selection of good folks, and folks, and bad folks who are not criticized leaves a lot to be desired, as it reinforces the propaganda used by first and second world nations to subjugate and maim so many third world nations.
September 24, 2012
Very interesting concept. I wish it were a bit longer so that the author could have gone into more detail about some things but aside from that it was a good read (ha-ha!). I had some trouble at times because there is a lot of scientific terms/talk that I'm not regularly familiar with so it took a moment for me to grasp some of what they were talking about.
November 23, 2017
I loved the ideas in the story. The interactions between male and female characters do come across a bit dated, though. Hey, it's 34 years old what did I expect? I read(listened to?) the audio version which I can't recommend. I found the reader distracting when she tried to do male voices with foreign accents. I've never heard the word alien pronounced "alley-N" before. Odd. All that said, I'll definitely read the others in the series.
Read
October 23, 2025The Makers searched for the secret to faster-than-light travel for 100,000 years. Their chosen instruments were the Life Probes, which they launched in every direction to seek out advanced civilizations among the stars. One such machine searching for intelligent life encounters 21st century Earth. It isn't sure that it has found any ...
September 6, 2024
It was fine. I'm giving it 3/5 because it's just bog standard sci-fi. Nothing remarkable. There are some similarities with The Expanse with the UN and the Belters, even using terms like "Belter" and "Rock hopper" I found that interesting.
October 3, 2021
The plot is interesting, but having oppressed people fighting back against imperialism being the villains kind of ruins it. If you somehow manage to ignore that, it's a good book.
September 24, 2022
Many different sub-topics. I liked the main one about the Probe but the others were sometimes slow and boring.
July 22, 2024
This is classic SciFy, so I am judging this differently than today's SciFy. Otherwise, it would lose a star for political clumsiness and childlike trustfulness on the part of some of the characters. (I blame the 1980s. :-) )
The story: The Makers have been seeking a means of faster-that-light travel (FTL) but cannot figure it out. They sent out probes to seek out intelligent lifeforms (that is, "life probes") and to seek their help with this problem. It will be an information exchange, but as the Life Probe approaches the Sol system, something goes wrong. The Probe needs a refit so that it can make it to Procyon, the star system it is seeking. As you might imagine, things go wrong as Earthlings suddenly realize the information resource that the Life Probe represents and that resource might fall into the hands of the wrong people.
Any problems with this story? Well... the Makers are a little too trusting. They are not total fools, but the whole idea of leading people back to their home planet to share ideas is just nuts. No real precautions are taken to prevent someone from tracing back the path of a Life Probe to find the Makers.
Secondly, the Life Probe has a sophisticated Artificial Intelligence (AI) on board. With that kind of sophistication, why would it need help from the people of Earth? We are talking about a Von Neumann probe, after all. It ought to be able to repair itself and even build duplicates of itself, but the author seems to be unaware of such an idea.
Finally, the politics are dated. Various countries have blended together but they are no more "united" than when they were separate nations. And there is a UN space force that has no "force" behind it.
Any modesty issues? One of the main characters seems to be having occasional and casual sex with one of her crewmates. It is stated about as casually as that. No description. She just gets lonely sometimes. The author throw around "d-mn" quite a bit, but nothing more serious than that. (In the 1600s that was a capital crime in Maryland.)
I reread this book because I'm on a Michael McCollum kick, and I really wanted to read the sequel, "Procyon's Promise".
The story: The Makers have been seeking a means of faster-that-light travel (FTL) but cannot figure it out. They sent out probes to seek out intelligent lifeforms (that is, "life probes") and to seek their help with this problem. It will be an information exchange, but as the Life Probe approaches the Sol system, something goes wrong. The Probe needs a refit so that it can make it to Procyon, the star system it is seeking. As you might imagine, things go wrong as Earthlings suddenly realize the information resource that the Life Probe represents and that resource might fall into the hands of the wrong people.
Any problems with this story? Well... the Makers are a little too trusting. They are not total fools, but the whole idea of leading people back to their home planet to share ideas is just nuts. No real precautions are taken to prevent someone from tracing back the path of a Life Probe to find the Makers.
Secondly, the Life Probe has a sophisticated Artificial Intelligence (AI) on board. With that kind of sophistication, why would it need help from the people of Earth? We are talking about a Von Neumann probe, after all. It ought to be able to repair itself and even build duplicates of itself, but the author seems to be unaware of such an idea.
Finally, the politics are dated. Various countries have blended together but they are no more "united" than when they were separate nations. And there is a UN space force that has no "force" behind it.
Any modesty issues? One of the main characters seems to be having occasional and casual sex with one of her crewmates. It is stated about as casually as that. No description. She just gets lonely sometimes. The author throw around "d-mn" quite a bit, but nothing more serious than that. (In the 1600s that was a capital crime in Maryland.)
I reread this book because I'm on a Michael McCollum kick, and I really wanted to read the sequel, "Procyon's Promise".
May 14, 2017
A fun read first contact story that I first read in the 1980's and one I have re-visited several times since. The story details contact between the human race and a life probe starship (self aware computer system that is in control) from a race called the Makers that arrives at Earth in the 21st century. This life probe is searching for advanced races that can assist with the FTL.
I have read several novels by the author and enjoy the stories he tells. Recommended for science fiction fans.
I have read several novels by the author and enjoy the stories he tells. Recommended for science fiction fans.
December 5, 2025
Spoilers.
This is a book about alien technology that enters the solar system and changes everything.
A United Nations style world government almost breaks apart, with some factions wanting to destroy it and others to learn from it.
It features asteroid miners called belters, artificial intelligences, and technology that allows humans to travel between the stars.
Now, you may ask, “didn’t you just describe the Expanse?”
This was the Expanse before the Expanse, and no one can convince me otherwise!
4.5 stars!
This is a book about alien technology that enters the solar system and changes everything.
A United Nations style world government almost breaks apart, with some factions wanting to destroy it and others to learn from it.
It features asteroid miners called belters, artificial intelligences, and technology that allows humans to travel between the stars.
Now, you may ask, “didn’t you just describe the Expanse?”
This was the Expanse before the Expanse, and no one can convince me otherwise!
4.5 stars!
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 7, 2015
Good solid hard science fiction. Some might quibble that some of the science is wrong (the universe is expanding, not shrinking toward the "big crunch"), but the book was published in 1983, before the huge advances in cosmology of recent years. I won't talk about the plot because I don't want to spoil it for anyone, but I really enjoyed it. Apparently it's the start of a series, so now I have to look for the next one.
April 22, 2008
Annoying, up-lifting, and relatively forgetable.
April 30, 2009
Generic.
August 18, 2013
Good yarn if a bit jerky.
April 9, 2012
I enjoyed it as well as the sequel "Procyons Promise".
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews