I Read Books: Space

Space

Reid Malenfant, former astronaut, travels to the moon where he meets Nemoto, a Japanese scientist. She has discovered anomalies in the solar system which indicate alien life. The Gaijin, self-replicating robots. They are not unfriendly, offering trade, space-borne raw materials for their mysterious interest in human culture and history. They’ll take humans places, though where is their choice; to some planets and asteroids in the solar system, strange events light years away, but not to Venus.

Malenfant travels to the outer edges of the solar system where they have come from, discovers a ring portal to Alpha Centauri. Although apparently instantaneous to the traveller, to the outside universe this takes the four years it takes light to travel the distance. Malenfant travels on, going where he and the Gaijin choose, slipping decades at a time.

The skies light up with aliens exploiting other star systems. It turns out that there is life everywhere. And more, even the solar system is not primeval, alien civilisations have been here in the past. This gets into the philosophical point, what are the odds that we’re alive at this exact moment when all the aliens arrive, just when humans have the capacity to get into space and understand what’s going on? When life extension technologies exist to allow some few humans to live long enough to get a greater view of the situation? Particularly Nemoto who lives a thousand years the hard way, as opposed to the other characters who skip decades and centuries through the ring portals.

What then if this is an unremarkable time in history. What if spaceborne civilisations are always springing up. (See the Carter Hypothesis in Manifold: Time for a different but related idea on the odds of being at this moment in history). That suggests something happens to squash them down again.

Can anything be done about that?

The book cycles through various versions of exhaustion, of civilisational collapse. And of rebirth, of daring, extraordinary ideas and actions to transform the future. Creatures from Earth’s past are recreated and let loose on the planet, including archaic types of humans, Uprights, homo erectus, Handy Men, homo habilis, and Neanderthals who use a natural nuclear reactor in Africa to maintain a colony on the moon Io and who have a role in the resolution. And Nemoto, with a thousand years to plot and manipulate the destiny of the human race pulls off an astounding coup.

Again, I’m putting off what this all means until I’ve re-read all four books in the expanded trilogy.

Read This: Humans grapple with the Fermi paradox and the meaning of deep time
Don’t Read This: Betrayal, emptiness and the smallness of humanity