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To Save the Sun | Rating | |
| B | |||
| Ben Bova and A. J. Austin | |||
| Series | Related Books | ||
| N/A | To Save the Sun, To Fear the Light | ||
It's a few hundred years in the future, and humanity has colonized many of the nearby stars to form the Empire of the Hundred Worlds. Earth itself is a relative backwater, occupied only by a few million humans that the other worlds use to check for genetic drift. But it seems that the Sun is due to undergo a catastrophic convulsion in a few hundred years that will leave Earth a cinder. The only option is to evacuate the homeworld, as the disaster cannot possibly be stopped.
Or can it? One young scientist proposes a radical project to revitalize the Sun. It will involve massive amounts of material and manpower and will last centuries. But the project faces a great deal of resistance - from a hidebound establishment, from religious fanatics, from ambitious men and women out for their own ends, from aliens worried about what a rejuvenated Empire might mean. The scientist has the Emperor on her side, but will it be enough to overcome such widespread resistance to change?
By and large, this is soft science fiction. Force fields are ubiquitous and come in many varieties, the ships are definitely not rockets, and gravity control is common. The authors did chose to forgo faster-than-light travel, though, which I found an odd discrepancy. It doesn't hurt the novel, not directly, and in fact the years spent traveling from star to star helps determine how the plot unfolds. It allows the story to focus on events in one place, and then shift to the other when someone finally arives there.
But this can be a bit disorienting, as characters age in relative eyeblinks. The first two hundred pages covers a hundred years! It also makes the story seem more than a bit linear - and extraordinarily episodic. It might almost be four or five good-sized short stories in a shared setting instead of a single novel.
On the other hand, they are pretty good short(ish) stories. The characters are real and well-rounded. The villains are a bit more one-dimensional, but never overly so and their motives are quite understandable. The mini plots are engaging, and one of them can even be cnsidered an action/adventure tale. None are a dry, boring relation of events, even those that rely on politics and introspection. They all drew me in nicely.
To Save the Sun was likely intended to be something of an epic tale, but I think it falls a bit short of that. Even so, it is still an enjoyable read. It has well crafted charcters that are all noticably different from each other, internally consistant technology, and good plots both overall and in the parts that make up the whole. It has no specific subgenre, it's just good science fiction, and people who enjoy such will likely enjoy this as well.
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