I finished the book this evening. I just picked it up
Thursday afternoon at
Powell's and I'm already done. I think that's something of a recent record. Not too many books are easy enough to read and keep me interested. Easy as in smooth, well written, the words slow smoothly by.
Space travel doesn't figure much in the tale. It's mostly a tale of surviving in a lifeboat in the North Atlantic during a winter storm and then washing up on the shore of Greenland. Well, the first half of the book is, and it's not the North Atlantic and Greenland, it's some other ocean on some other human-habitable planet. Slotter Key, that's the name of it.
The second half of the book involves exploring a giant underground military base, empty at the moment, but well stocked and equipped, so maybe they only use this place during the summer. There is something odd about this place though. Most everything is normal, but they run into something they don't understand, like the lights or the remote controls, things that are just odd enough they must be alien or very old. Nothing like what anyone uses now. But I don't remember aliens in any of Ms. Moon's early sci-fi adventures, so this a new twist. Then again, they might not be aliens, they just might be really old.
The main thrust of the story is how do you protect two dozen people when a couple hundred heavily armed, blood-thirsty men are coming to kill you in four days? Ky's strategy is to abandon their safe underground redoubt and run away. You have mystery vehicles you can ride in, but they only go 15 MPH and we don't know what kind of range they have. You could travel on the surface. Traveling for 24 hours a day, you ought to be able to cover 300 miles, baring impassible abysses which are common enough in places where there are no maps. (What do you think happened to all the map makers who ventured into these uncharted areas?)
Or you could follow the mystery tunnel. It's mostly a tunnel, there are doors off to the side occasionally, but we ignore them, press on! is the order of the day. This is Ky's choice. They drive for 12 hours a day and then they stop to rest and recuperate. They travel for 3 days and cover hundreds of miles. This is one really long tunnel. This has got to be aliens.
But wait, this is a space faring civilization, the have some kind of Warp drive that lets them travel to nearby stars in a matter of days. I'm pretty sure if you can do
FTL, digging a tunnel completely around the planet is not out of your reach. Why anyone would do that is, well, crazy people who want to build
gravity trains, they would.
 |
| Gravity Defying Spaceship |
Some of the details about the technology this civilization builds and uses were a little thought provoking. They have interstellar flight, but they don't land their spaceships, they stay in orbit. They have shuttles to carry people and cargo to and from orbit. Of course the military do have star-ships that can land, but they cost extra.
An FTL spaceship is happiest in space. Once you have gotten out of the gravity well, you really don't want to go back in there if you can help it. FTL ships would be happiest navigating between stars, that is about as far out of the gravity well you can get, at least within our galaxy. Coming in toward a star (to visit your parents or pick up some fresh fruit) you are going to have to loose a lot of speed. Not just the speed you accelerated to get here in time for grandma's birthday party, but also the speed you acquired falling down the gravity well to this sun. It would really be nice if we could get a handle on gravity. I'm not really counting on it.
We just now managed to detect a gravity wave using very large and expensive machines, and it was a wave from a granddaddy of an explosion, at least in our quadrant of the universe. I'm more in favor of whatever comes after the fusion rocket, say, 500 years down the road.
Anyway, shuttles are a really terrible way to get up to orbit and back. Surely if they can build FTL spaceships they could build a
space elevator, but then I realized that you would need a serious amount of interstellar traffic in order to justify the construction of one. That's how we build bridges, you need to have the demand first in order make building a bridge, or a space elevator, a viable proposition. Building a space elevator would be an enormous undertaking, not to mention that we don't know how to do it yet. This is a world that was only colonized a few hundred years ago, so while interstellar trade exists, it isn't swamping their ability to handle it.
Everyone has a smart phone implanted in their head, well, everyone except those weirdos in that one weird sect. Mizzy-something. They don't. Ky also has an ansible, science-fiction's solution for instantaneous interstellar communication, implanted in her head as well. Now I can't remember any reference to the power for the skullphones, but Ky has to connect her head to a power outlet with a wire in order to run the ansible. This to me just sounds like a really bad idea. Anything using that much power is sure to be giving a noticeable amount of heat unless it's turning that energy into instantaneous quantum fluctuations. And why carry it around in your head if you need to plug it in anyway?
There could be reasons, like it's some kind living organic mesh that lies on top of your brain and communicates directly with your synapses. So it's not just a bad idea, now it's creepy too. But then there was that really good looking babe on Star Trek that was hosting a living symbiot. That was a little creepy. Good looking woman, but the creep factor was a little disturbing. What if that thing in her decided to colonize your brain and it was able to do that because the girl favored you (biblically, so to speak)?
Or it could be a function of the times, like somebody figured out how to a do a brain to computer interface, and the first computers they used were so small and such low power that a power cable wasn't needed. Maybe they used a radioactive battery like a pacemaker does, or maybe they had a flexible device that generated power when it got bent. Or maybe they had some kind of organic-chemical battery that sucked oxygen from your blood, or electrons from your neurons. Whatever, it wasn't an issue, but the brain-computer interface was such a hit, people started using it for all kind of things, and when the ansible came along, implanting it seemed like the logical solution, because it uses this same brain-computer interface as the skullphones all use. So it uses a little extra power, we'll just give her a cable and she can plug it into the wall. It is a prototype after all, not our fault if she fries herself.
There is one scene at the end where our heroes are being closely pursued by the bad guys. They can hear the bad guys climbing the stairs a dozen flights behind them. But now the passageway ends in a mountain cave home to a hibernating bear. Our heroes manage to sneak by, but you just know the bad guys aren't going to be the least sneaky and they are going to wake up bear and there is going to be hell to pay for all concerned. On one hand I want our intrepid band to block the stairway. It's basically a small passage in a mountain, a cave if you will. Of course a blast big enough to block the stairs is liable to upset the bear as well. Kind of a tough choice, especially since you didn't bring any dynamite with you. Or rock-drills, which you kind of need if you are blasting in rock.
Then there is the business of anti-gravity aboard the spaceships and the existence of tractor beams. If you have these, then what do you need with aircraft and space shuttles? Okay, they are technology heavy and you can't justify using them if ordinary methods will get the job done. Space ships get anti-gravity because it's just a side benefit of being able to warp space. Kind of like an automobile heater is a side benefit of having an internal combustion engine*. Great Aunt Grace has tractor beams holding up the driveway to her corporate headquarters. Don't want anybody driving up to your front door? Just turn off the tractor beams and suddenly big holes appear in your driveway. At least that's how I interpreted what I read.
So it's a rough and tumble sort of story with plenty of action and people dealing with daily problems. But there is also another thread about the stability of society. There was a civil war within living memory here and apparently not everyone is satisfied with the way it turned out. On the surface all is calm, but treachery lurks in the shadows, and there are lots of shadows here. The corruption is well entrenched and runs deep. I look at what's going on in the world and it's not that much different than what's in the story.
Look at our world. For instance, Russia has always gotten bad press. First when they were Communist and now with Putin in charge and they are resurgent once again. I suspect that at the higher levels things aren't much different than they are here. Oh, maybe Putin will have you killed if he finds something about you that he doesn't like, but over here they just ruin your life to the point where maybe you wish you were dead.
I'm all in favor of rooting out corruption, but there doesn't seem to be any end to it. Maybe it's just the nature of our society. Maybe that would change if we just changed a couple of the rules. But what rules could those be? I was thinking it would have to be small change, but with the right propaganda we could implement almost anything. So basically anything is on the table, but I really don't know what the rule would be.
* Internal combustion engines that throw off a whole bunch of waste heat. Two thirds of the energy from the fuel they burn is wasted. The amount of heat produced by the heater is a small fraction of the energy available.
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