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The Caloris Network: A Scientific Novel
The year is 2130. The first-ever expedition is sent to Mercury to search for the cause of an unknown source of electromagnetic radiation that can destroy space ships passing by the planet. Thought to be inhospitable and lifeless, the surface of Mercury provides startling surprises for the crew that endanger their lives and challenge their established notions of what it means to be a sentient being. And some of the crew members have their own separate agendas …The scientific appendix at the end of the book introduces readers to the wondrous world of Mercury and how it has been portrayed in literary fiction up to the present time. The author then uses scientific literature to present a concept of life that is not based on carbon chemistry or the need for water. There is also a discussion of consciousness based on electromagnetic wave theory. References are provided for further reading.Nick Kanas is an Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, where he directed the group therapy training program. For over 20 years he conducted research on group therapy, and for nearly 20 years after that he was the Principal Investigator of NASA-funded research on astronauts and cosmonauts. He is the co-author of Space Psychology and Psychiatry, which won the 2004 International Academy of Astronautics Life Science Book Award, and the author of Humans in The Psychological Hurdles, which won the 2016 International Academy of Astronautics Life Science Book Award.
Dr. Kanas has presented talks on space psychology and on celestial mapping at several regional and Worldcon science fiction conventions. A Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society (London), he has been an amateur astronomer for over 50 years and is an avid reader of science fiction. He is also the author of two non-fiction books (Star History, Artistry, and Cartography and Solar System From Antiquity to the Space Age) and two science fiction novels (The New Martians and The Protos Mandate), all published by Springer.
Dr. Kanas has presented talks on space psychology and on celestial mapping at several regional and Worldcon science fiction conventions. A Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society (London), he has been an amateur astronomer for over 50 years and is an avid reader of science fiction. He is also the author of two non-fiction books (Star History, Artistry, and Cartography and Solar System From Antiquity to the Space Age) and two science fiction novels (The New Martians and The Protos Mandate), all published by Springer.
- GenresScience FictionFiction
134 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 13, 2016
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July 21, 2016
As the subtitle 'a scientific novel' suggests, this is another in Springer's innovative series attempting to combine science fiction and science fact, but is sadly not one of the stronger entries in the series.
In this novella (despite that subtitle, I can't really bring myself to describe 100 pages of fiction as a novel), we join the crew on a mission to Mercury - but they haven't been told the whole truth about their mission, lives have already been lost, and what they discover there proves quite a shock - a totally alien form of life.
On the good side, we discover quite a lot about Mercury, not often written about in science fiction (perhaps, in part, because it's a touch boring). There's also a bit about astrobiology, and the possibilities of life that isn't carbon-based. Of itself, this is nothing new, but the approach taken by Nick Kanas, slightly bizarrely a psychiatrist who used to work for NASA, is relatively novel.
The biggest problem, perhaps, is this book's functioning as a novel. For a large part of the opening section we are waiting for this part of Mercury to warm up in the sunlight, and, frankly, very little happens. To counter this, Kanas resorts to a whole lot of jumping around, with assorted flashbacks, which tends to confuse more than than they succeed in keeping the story going. There is also the classic weakly-written fiction assumption that in order for a character to have an idea they have to be inspired by remembering or seeing something. Here there was a particularly painful example where the main character 'remembers' that her Alzheimer's suffering father responded to music and lights more than speech. 'So, we tried sending out a radio hailing frequency to the [alien], and it responded to us.' Huh? Not only is it a gratuitous 'I remembered X and it gave me an idea,' the resultant idea is a total non sequitur.
So it's certainly not a book I'd recommend reading for entertainment as pure science fiction - it was no page turner. However, the combination of the aspects described in the text and the additional factual information in the 'science behind the fiction' section at the back about Mercury and silicon-based life was interesting enough to make this worth a look.
As I've commented on other books in the series, the pricing, in this case £15 for a 100 page novella plus about 20 factual pages in paperback, means this is very unlikely to be justifiable as a personal purchase - the publisher points out it is accessible free to academics and students through Springer's ebook deals.
In this novella (despite that subtitle, I can't really bring myself to describe 100 pages of fiction as a novel), we join the crew on a mission to Mercury - but they haven't been told the whole truth about their mission, lives have already been lost, and what they discover there proves quite a shock - a totally alien form of life.
On the good side, we discover quite a lot about Mercury, not often written about in science fiction (perhaps, in part, because it's a touch boring). There's also a bit about astrobiology, and the possibilities of life that isn't carbon-based. Of itself, this is nothing new, but the approach taken by Nick Kanas, slightly bizarrely a psychiatrist who used to work for NASA, is relatively novel.
The biggest problem, perhaps, is this book's functioning as a novel. For a large part of the opening section we are waiting for this part of Mercury to warm up in the sunlight, and, frankly, very little happens. To counter this, Kanas resorts to a whole lot of jumping around, with assorted flashbacks, which tends to confuse more than than they succeed in keeping the story going. There is also the classic weakly-written fiction assumption that in order for a character to have an idea they have to be inspired by remembering or seeing something. Here there was a particularly painful example where the main character 'remembers' that her Alzheimer's suffering father responded to music and lights more than speech. 'So, we tried sending out a radio hailing frequency to the [alien], and it responded to us.' Huh? Not only is it a gratuitous 'I remembered X and it gave me an idea,' the resultant idea is a total non sequitur.
So it's certainly not a book I'd recommend reading for entertainment as pure science fiction - it was no page turner. However, the combination of the aspects described in the text and the additional factual information in the 'science behind the fiction' section at the back about Mercury and silicon-based life was interesting enough to make this worth a look.
As I've commented on other books in the series, the pricing, in this case £15 for a 100 page novella plus about 20 factual pages in paperback, means this is very unlikely to be justifiable as a personal purchase - the publisher points out it is accessible free to academics and students through Springer's ebook deals.
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