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Alpha Centauri
The crew of the spaceship Mother Night awakens from fourteen years of suspended animation in Alpha Centauri A and B, where they hope to establish an off-world colony, but as they locate remnants of an extinct alien civilization, they discover they have been infected by a deadly virus. Simultaneous.
- GenresScience FictionFiction
256 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1997
About the author
William Barton
132 books19 followersWilliam Renald Barton III (born September 28, 1950) is an American science fiction writer. In addition to his standalone novels, he is also known for collaborations with Michael Capobianco. Many of their novels deal with themes such as the Cold War, space travel, and space opera.
Barton also has written short stories that put an emphasis on sexuality and human morality in otherwise traditional science fiction. His short fiction has appeared in Asimov's and Sci Fiction, and has been nominated for the Hugo Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Award, the Sidewise Award, and the HOMer Award, and three of his novels (The Transmigration of Souls, Acts of Conscience, and When We Were Real) have been nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award.
Librarian Note:
There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Barton also has written short stories that put an emphasis on sexuality and human morality in otherwise traditional science fiction. His short fiction has appeared in Asimov's and Sci Fiction, and has been nominated for the Hugo Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Award, the Sidewise Award, and the HOMer Award, and three of his novels (The Transmigration of Souls, Acts of Conscience, and When We Were Real) have been nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award.
Librarian Note:
There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
October 14, 2019
The more traditionally science fiction part of the story deals with the first starship from Earth to arrive in another star system - Alpha Centauri. A number of starships have been sent out to look for habitable planets as new homes for an overpopulated Earth. The Alpha Centauri stars and their planets are older than our solar system. Exploration of the system finds evidence of alien civilizations which began billions of years ago and disappeared long ago. The planets have aged through all this time and don't offer a promising new home for humans. A device which gets data from the quantum level gives them extrapolated views of what those lost civilizations were like and how they disappeared.
That story is mixed with and skewed by issues among the crew (originally 10 men and women, but one didn't survive suspended animation on the trip there.)
Some readers may be uncomfortable with the amount of description of various sexual activity - including some non-consentual or nonstandard. In many cases, this is associated with something about a particular character. The captain is a woman who grew up in a cult community in which adolescent girls were ritually used in orgies. The engineer was born male (still using "he"), but later had a medical procedure making his obvious genitalia female, yet being able to bring out male. The planetologist has multiple personalities and is associated with a secret society "Indigo" - in which men are infected with a sexually transmitable organism(?) which leaves women sterile. Once out of suspended animation, he starts to seduce / infect the female crew members. I'm not sure that this required as much sexual detail as the book contains, but it's not merely about "mating season."
That being said, there does seem to be a lot of various hooking up of different combinations of crew members. This may partly be to suggest why Earth has become overpopulated. It's also because we're shown several crew member's psychological damage from their younger days. Perhaps, this is meant to suggest that the kinds of people who would volunteer to leave almost everything from their past life behind and travel light-years away to a previously unexplored star system may have some serious issues which make such a choice easier. One way or the other, these aspects play a big role in the book. Readers should consider where such a book belongs in their priorities.
In the end, the device tells the crew that the "spider" aliens stagnated and withered away because they lacked real goals and drives to give them reason to continue. Perhaps, the author is trying to tell us that the kinds of things that can emotionally damage us and twist us also keeps us going. It's not really the kind of question I seek to explore.
That story is mixed with and skewed by issues among the crew (originally 10 men and women, but one didn't survive suspended animation on the trip there.)
Some readers may be uncomfortable with the amount of description of various sexual activity - including some non-consentual or nonstandard. In many cases, this is associated with something about a particular character. The captain is a woman who grew up in a cult community in which adolescent girls were ritually used in orgies. The engineer was born male (still using "he"), but later had a medical procedure making his obvious genitalia female, yet being able to bring out male. The planetologist has multiple personalities and is associated with a secret society "Indigo" - in which men are infected with a sexually transmitable organism(?) which leaves women sterile. Once out of suspended animation, he starts to seduce / infect the female crew members. I'm not sure that this required as much sexual detail as the book contains, but it's not merely about "mating season."
That being said, there does seem to be a lot of various hooking up of different combinations of crew members. This may partly be to suggest why Earth has become overpopulated. It's also because we're shown several crew member's psychological damage from their younger days. Perhaps, this is meant to suggest that the kinds of people who would volunteer to leave almost everything from their past life behind and travel light-years away to a previously unexplored star system may have some serious issues which make such a choice easier. One way or the other, these aspects play a big role in the book. Readers should consider where such a book belongs in their priorities.
In the end, the device tells the crew that the "spider" aliens stagnated and withered away because they lacked real goals and drives to give them reason to continue. Perhaps, the author is trying to tell us that the kinds of things that can emotionally damage us and twist us also keeps us going. It's not really the kind of question I seek to explore.
March 8, 2010
A glacially paced book about humanity's first interstellar expedition to the Alpha Centauri star system. A combination of hard sci-fi and messy sexual relations between the crew members. There really wasn't much of a story at all, just a series of confusing and ambiguous explorations. The themes were all depressing and nihilistic.
April 27, 2015
1/4th Sci-Fi, sort of, 3/4ths porn. And this is coming from someone who is open about sex and sexuality. Idiotic, long-winded book. Removed from collection.
January 13, 2025
Don't waste your time. Zero characters that I ever cared squat about what happens to them. I hate to seem prudish, but the sex was WAY too much. And the story never came close to fulfilling the promise implied by the back-cover blurb. If I happen to stumble across any more books in my collection by this author that I have not read yet, I'll just trash them rather than take to second- hand store in order to avoid inflicting them upon any other unsuspecting victim.
March 3, 2018
Published 1997. Not finished because I just couldn't get past the first 30 pages or so. Just too freaking complicated and then there are all the sexual bits to wait through. Not my cup o tea.
February 19, 2026
Don’t bother. Slow moving. Difficult to get into, takes forever to figure out the characters. Probably only the second book I’ve ever quit on.
January 10, 2013
The 1998 novel Alpha Centauri, one of several co-authored in the 1990s by
William Barton
and
Michael Barton
is a novel I'm glad I read. I think.
It was almost inevitable that Alpha Centauri , one of the brightest visible objects in the night sky and home to the nearest stars to our own world outside of the Sun, has featured in numerous works of fiction . Of the three stars of Alpha Centauri, two are reasonably like our own Sun, while for the past month one of these has been definitively known to host a planet. Alpha Centauri has been commonly imagined not only as a destination for explorers but as a potential second home for humanity, a planetary system that--if we're lucky--could support a new Earth to supplement, or replace, the old.
It's the hope of finding a potential second home for humanity that starts off Alpha Centauri. Forty years ago, at the beginning of the 23rd century, the sublight starship Mother Night was launched to explore Alpha Centauri, its crew of ten charged with scouting the trinary system of the title to determine its suitability for colonization. The Solar System, densely colonized by immortals, is now home to three hundred billion people and nearing potentially catastrophic resource shortages, leaving the oligarchy that runs the lot with no option to ensure their survival but to look for homes outside the solar system. As soon as the Mother Night arrives, however, its crew discovers that for hundreds of millions of years, the Alpha Centauri system was populated by a technologically advanced civilization. What happened to them? Is it too late for humanity to learn lessons? Unbeknownst to the investigating crew, however, one of their number belongs to a secret organization devoted to preventing the human cancer from spreading to the stars. Complications ensue.
I really wanted to like the book. Alpha Centauri is full of interesting ideas, from the resource scarcity that a fast-growing society of immortals could soon risk, to the mechanics of the Mother Night's interstellar flight, to the planetography of the aged worlds of the Alpha Centauri system (here given an age of eight billion years, versus the five to six billion commonly cited and the roughly 4.5 billion of our own) to the complex social mechanics of the three-species civilization that lives for such a long time in the Alpha Centauri system. The novel did creatively take on the trope of Alpha Centauri as a place where new beginnings could be found, making it a place where visitors would not start blithely anew but rather a place where visitors would examine themselves and their society in the light of the local suns.
Why couldn't I commit to the book? Questions of character plausibility and likeability, frankly. This is lampshaded at one point in the narrative, when the captain of the Mother Night thinks to herself that the screening procedures applied to the first people to explore another planetary system were terribly flawed. The captain, for instance, is a survivor of years of sexual abuse by her parents and others in an isolated Antarctic commune who doesn't seem to have received any psychiatric treatment at all; the chief planetary scientist is a stitched-together aggregate of multiple personalities possessed by a repellent internal misogyny; the ship's doctor turns out to be a double agent; yet another of the scientists is a borderline abuser of his partner. (Happily, the coupled gay computer technicians are a bedrock of stability.) I'd think that there'd be enough pressures associated with a crew of ten people isolated light-years from any other humans in a planetary system filled with ancient alien ruins without assuming the incompetence of the planners of humanity's interstellar mission. Christian Sauvé's review highlights the prominence of explicit sex scenes of all kinds in the narrative as something that distracts the reader from Alpha Centauri's interesting ideas. Me, I was more disturbed by the fact that the first explicit sex scene was a detailed first-person description of the rape of the captain at the tender age of 12 by her parents.
Alpha Centauri could have been a great book had its authors not tried to explore everything and not done so in ways that made me indifferent to the survival of the characters and their civilization. It speaks to the strength of these ideas that I'll rate it "good", with the note that readers should be prepared.
It was almost inevitable that Alpha Centauri , one of the brightest visible objects in the night sky and home to the nearest stars to our own world outside of the Sun, has featured in numerous works of fiction . Of the three stars of Alpha Centauri, two are reasonably like our own Sun, while for the past month one of these has been definitively known to host a planet. Alpha Centauri has been commonly imagined not only as a destination for explorers but as a potential second home for humanity, a planetary system that--if we're lucky--could support a new Earth to supplement, or replace, the old.
It's the hope of finding a potential second home for humanity that starts off Alpha Centauri. Forty years ago, at the beginning of the 23rd century, the sublight starship Mother Night was launched to explore Alpha Centauri, its crew of ten charged with scouting the trinary system of the title to determine its suitability for colonization. The Solar System, densely colonized by immortals, is now home to three hundred billion people and nearing potentially catastrophic resource shortages, leaving the oligarchy that runs the lot with no option to ensure their survival but to look for homes outside the solar system. As soon as the Mother Night arrives, however, its crew discovers that for hundreds of millions of years, the Alpha Centauri system was populated by a technologically advanced civilization. What happened to them? Is it too late for humanity to learn lessons? Unbeknownst to the investigating crew, however, one of their number belongs to a secret organization devoted to preventing the human cancer from spreading to the stars. Complications ensue.
I really wanted to like the book. Alpha Centauri is full of interesting ideas, from the resource scarcity that a fast-growing society of immortals could soon risk, to the mechanics of the Mother Night's interstellar flight, to the planetography of the aged worlds of the Alpha Centauri system (here given an age of eight billion years, versus the five to six billion commonly cited and the roughly 4.5 billion of our own) to the complex social mechanics of the three-species civilization that lives for such a long time in the Alpha Centauri system. The novel did creatively take on the trope of Alpha Centauri as a place where new beginnings could be found, making it a place where visitors would not start blithely anew but rather a place where visitors would examine themselves and their society in the light of the local suns.
Why couldn't I commit to the book? Questions of character plausibility and likeability, frankly. This is lampshaded at one point in the narrative, when the captain of the Mother Night thinks to herself that the screening procedures applied to the first people to explore another planetary system were terribly flawed. The captain, for instance, is a survivor of years of sexual abuse by her parents and others in an isolated Antarctic commune who doesn't seem to have received any psychiatric treatment at all; the chief planetary scientist is a stitched-together aggregate of multiple personalities possessed by a repellent internal misogyny; the ship's doctor turns out to be a double agent; yet another of the scientists is a borderline abuser of his partner. (Happily, the coupled gay computer technicians are a bedrock of stability.) I'd think that there'd be enough pressures associated with a crew of ten people isolated light-years from any other humans in a planetary system filled with ancient alien ruins without assuming the incompetence of the planners of humanity's interstellar mission. Christian Sauvé's review highlights the prominence of explicit sex scenes of all kinds in the narrative as something that distracts the reader from Alpha Centauri's interesting ideas. Me, I was more disturbed by the fact that the first explicit sex scene was a detailed first-person description of the rape of the captain at the tender age of 12 by her parents.
Alpha Centauri could have been a great book had its authors not tried to explore everything and not done so in ways that made me indifferent to the survival of the characters and their civilization. It speaks to the strength of these ideas that I'll rate it "good", with the note that readers should be prepared.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 15, 2026
What makes Alpha Centauri so damn engaging is how William Barton exposes the tiny compromises people make every day before realizing they’ve surrendered their freedom.
August 2, 2008
When someone asks me to name my favorite book, I always reach an impasse between this novel and The Dying Earth by Jack Vance. The two can't really be compared because they have nothing in common, so I usually end up listing both. The Dying Earth wins in fantasy, and Alpha Centauri wins in hard sci-fi.
There's a LOT of sex in this book, described graphically, but despite what you might think, that's no why I like it. :P I mention it only as a warning. If the book were a movie, it'd be rated X.
There's a LOT of sex in this book, described graphically, but despite what you might think, that's no why I like it. :P I mention it only as a warning. If the book were a movie, it'd be rated X.
February 3, 2008
This is the second time I've read this book and it held up over the years. This is really the tale of one man's unraveling psychosis and the lives that he impacts, while uncovering a long lost race of beings that lived in the Alpha Centauri system billions of years ago. The psychosis is well-written and believable as is the drama between the crewmembers.
August 24, 2009
Is jargon a plot device? Brief spurts of action interspersed with the nauseous back-stories of the main characters. It didn't really start getting interesting to me until page 250. The end was okay, but mostly I found it repetitious and tiresome and a bit dull.
March 12, 2012
My first DNF! Multiple perspectives, flashbacks, and general confusion send this book back to the used book store. I wish I had been able to push through to the sex, but I was annoyed from the second chapter. Which is too bad, because some of the detailed tech was intriguing.
April 6, 2013
More like 3.5 stars, so chose 4 as a round up due to the last chapter. A good exploration of space drama and the human soul.
April 28, 2015
I greatly enjoyed this book. Some good old classic space exploration mixed with complex relationships among the members of the exploration crew. Lots of creativity went into writing this.
April 17, 2017
There was not much of a story or a plot. Just a dysfunctional crew on an interstellar spaceship.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews