Sundog (SF) - Brian Ball ****

Brian Ball's main character, Dod, in this slight dated but still effective title, is a space pilot on a grunt run from Pluto to the Moon. (The weakest aspect of the book is the assumption that anyone would want to have a regular route to Pluto.) A few hundred years before, the solar system was locked in by some unknown alien force. After a military coup, the Company runs the whole solar system with an iron grip based on a mixture of brute force and psychology.

In one sense this book is a classic 'rebellion against the empire' book, the sort of thing Asimov was doing years before - but there's more to it, and here's where the similarities with Fritz Leiber's Gather Darkness! come through. Our hero turns out to be mentally programmed by the bad guys to change his behaviour - previously a brilliant scientist he is now a thick pilot. But the conditioning starts to crack when suddenly he is endowed with a halo. (This proves to be a result of contact from the aliens, but that comes much later.) Bizarrely, halos also feature in the other book as part of the priests' uniform.

So imposed on top of the rebellion against empire story is our hero's gradual discovery of who he is (decidedly Bourne Identity), plus some mental frippery that eventually enables him to contact the aliens. It is actually a much more layered book than it first appears. There is also a slight link to Heinlein here too. Heinlein's later books almost all featured a character that seemed to be a thinly veiled version of himself. This guy would be old, incredibly wise and rather cynical. The Gompertz character in Sundog is just such a person - all he lacks from the Heinlein clones like Jubal Harshaw (the only name I can remember offhand) is he's not obsessed with sex.

Paperback:

Kindle:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Who Invented the Computer? – Ian Watson

Ian Watson is the author of The Universal Machine and featured in a recent Four Way Interview . Saturday June 23 2012 was the centenary of the birth of Alan Turing, the troubled genius who invented the modern computer. Why though do so few people recognize his name and his great achievements? In 1936 English mathematician Alan Turing, published a paper, On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem . This became the foundation of computing. In it Turing presented a theoretical machine that could solve any problem that could be described by instructions encoded on a paper tape. A Turing Machine could calculate square roots, whilst another might solve Sudoku puzzles. Turing demonstrated you could construct a single Universal Machine that could simulate any Turing Machine. One machine solving any problem for which a program could be written – sound familiar? He’d invented the computer. Then, computers were peop...

Ignorance: How it drives science – Stuart Firestein *****

This is a delightful little book that really gets you thinking. I stress the ‘little’ part not as a negative, but as a good thing. There is nothing worse than fat, bloated popular science books where the author feels they have to get 120,000 words to be taken seriously. This is the sort of book that can be read in a couple of hours – but you will get so much more out of it than one of those tedious doorstops. The premise underlying the book is in once sense extremely simple, yet is fundamental to an understanding of what science is and what scientists do. And it is an understanding that is totally at odds with the typical way science is portrayed both in university lectures and popular science books. As Stuart Firestein points out, what is important is not the facts, but rather the area of ignorance. The interesting part and the fundamental heart of science is not about what we know, but about what we don’t know and where we want to look next. Take this lovely quote: ‘Working ...

The Star Book – Peter Grego ****

This attractive landscape format book combines an excellent introduction to the stars and basic astronomy with a set of star maps, plus in depth looks at some of the stars featured, with a bonus section on the solar system. Amazon says it’s a hardback, but in fact it’s a paperback with a rather ingenious cover – you can’t tell from the photo, but the words ‘The Star Book’ are punched through as a series of holes that show the white paper of the next page beneath. Like many astronomy/space books, the cover lacks shelf appeal because it is mostly black, but at least there is some original thought here. Unlike many books in this format which tend to concentrate on the pictures, there is a good deal of excellent text by Peter Grego, so there was no feeling that you were only getting the star maps and star ‘biographies’, something these days much more suited to an iPad or smartphone app. Instead, the opening 30 or so pages give a very good introduction that would be valuable to ...

Search This Blog