From the Bookshelf: Inherit the Stars
I was poking through a used book store a while back when I spotted three science fiction paperbacks by one author that I had read some time before. The thought of reading them again was interesting enough that I bought all three, and I started with "Inherit the Stars" by James P. Hogan. (To be fair, the book can be read online in Baen Books's catalogue... but mentioning that, of course, might help others to follow along with this post.) It's somehow intriguing in a peculiar way. The book might be called "hard science fiction," but with the old-fashioned allusion that the writing style is a little odd, perhaps even a little inelegant, in a way I can't quite articulate, and the characters aren't that memorable with perhaps a few exceptions... and yet, the central idea the book is built around is compelling. After some pages of leisurely development towards the introduction of that idea, we learn at last that in the near-future exploration of the moon, a human body in a red spacesuit is discovered... and determined to be fifty thousand years old. Where did he come from?
The book perhaps interests me because its action is intellectual, a matter of finding new information, decoding it, and seeing how it affects the existing theories. No artificial crises in whatever field are invented to get in the way of the scientists (although I suppose a conflict of considerable scope is uncovered along the way), and in some ways that's refreshingly different for me. Of course, a book that involves scientific speculation but is thirty years old does lead to the occasional thought about the new theory of the moon's origin deduced since writing or noting that the book is commendably firm about evolutionary biology and the improbability of "parallel evolution from scratch" but still seems to misrepresent human evolution a little for the sake of its argument... but in the end, the ideas developed are big enough to be interesting in their own right. At the very end of the book, though, there's a brief epilogue that seems a little ambiguous to me when compared to the rest of the book, where a palaeontologist finds a bit of useful evidence but immediately concludes it has to be a bad joke and throws it away... we know something where the characters apparently won't, and compared to the open-minded evaluations of the rest of the book it seems somehow a little stereotypical.
The book perhaps interests me because its action is intellectual, a matter of finding new information, decoding it, and seeing how it affects the existing theories. No artificial crises in whatever field are invented to get in the way of the scientists (although I suppose a conflict of considerable scope is uncovered along the way), and in some ways that's refreshingly different for me. Of course, a book that involves scientific speculation but is thirty years old does lead to the occasional thought about the new theory of the moon's origin deduced since writing or noting that the book is commendably firm about evolutionary biology and the improbability of "parallel evolution from scratch" but still seems to misrepresent human evolution a little for the sake of its argument... but in the end, the ideas developed are big enough to be interesting in their own right. At the very end of the book, though, there's a brief epilogue that seems a little ambiguous to me when compared to the rest of the book, where a palaeontologist finds a bit of useful evidence but immediately concludes it has to be a bad joke and throws it away... we know something where the characters apparently won't, and compared to the open-minded evaluations of the rest of the book it seems somehow a little stereotypical.