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| Cover art by Bob Eggleton |
| MISSION TO MINERVA James P. Hogan |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| New York: Baen Books, 2005 | ISBN 0-7434-9902-6 | 408pp | HC/GSI | $26.00 | |
James Hogan has written more than 26 books of fiction. Four of them previous to this one revolve around physicist Dr. Victor Hunt, an Englishman who works for the United Nations Space Authority. Dr. Hunt has had an interesting career, to put it mildly. He discovered the remains of spacesuited humans which had lain on the Moon for 500 centuries. Following clues related to that find, he ventured to the outer solar system and found the wreck of a starship on Ganymede. This, in turn, led him to living representatives of the race that sent the starship. Originating on Minerva, a planet that once orbited our sun between Mars and Jupiter, they had migrated to a star 20 light years away.
Thuriens, as they call themselves, are thoroughly alien in form: eight to nine feet tall, with dark complexions and heads shaped like anvils. Their character is entirely unlike the human; it lacks the tendency to establish pecking orders, with all that implies. Thuriens have no lust for power, no greed for wealth or property. There are no police forces on Thurios, and no need for them.
Victor Hunt provides insight into another aspect of the Thurien character: their dispassionate scientific curiosity.
"Hunt couldn't make out whether she approved or not. The kind of tradition she was from would not have accustomed her to see the beneficial side, but from his previous dealings with Thuriens he knew something about how they worked. There was no Thurien Establishment to pronounce the approved consensus on a given subject, or any institutionalized reward system that would encourage conformity to it. Ideas either worked or they didn't; predictions succeeded or failed; evidence said what it said regardless of anyone's preferences or preconceptions. Without political pressures or fears of losing face—which didn't especially affect Thuriens in any case—individuals left alone to make their own assessments in their own time would eventually come around to playing a part in an act that was going somewhere, rather than be left out in the cold with one that wasn't." – Pages 69-70 |
Humans now have a productive and relatively friendly relationship with the Thuriens. But, under the surface, the Thuriens have doubts about humanity. Their relations with our species go back a long way, and these doubts are justified. Thuriens are never aggressive or impatient, yet they can be ruthless, and ruthlessly efficient, in dealing with a threat to their society. Some are convinced that humans are or may become such a threat, because long ago they were. As a consequence, the Thuriens have countermeasures ready — countermeasures based on a technology far superior to anything Earth can muster. But for the moment, they find more benefit in cooperating with humans. Thus it is that when Victor Hunt gets an unusual phone call on Earth one day, he turns to Thurien scientists with whom he has worked in the past to solve some formidable mysteries. This new mystery seems more formidable still; for the phone call was from himself. More properly, it was from a Victor Hunt in what's often called a parallel universe. The probe maintaining the connection becomes unstable and disintegrates into quantum foam before the call is completed; but our Victor Hunt gets enough to launch him on a quest to solve the problems involved in setting up stable connections between universes.
I had heard that James Hogan, in later life, wandered into what is sometimes derisively called "woo" — denying the reality of Darwinian evolution and such. It was hard to believe. In this tale at least, continuing the saga of the Giants, he sticks to the hard science for which he is known and justly famous.
Alas, however, this tale of woo proved to be true. Hogan has columns at Lew Rockwell's Web site. One claims to debunk the mainstream view of climate science, arguing that global warming is not happening. In addition to his own novels and collections, his online bookstore sells the Heretics series: volumes by David Ray Griffith (a prime troofer), and by Andrew Montford, Christopher Booker and Ian Plimer.1 Another column, on his own site, touts "ClimateGate" as disproving AGW and links to pieces by Timothy Ball and James Delingpole.2 Wikipedia says he accepts Velikovsky, and believes AIDS is caused by drugs.
Meanwhile, the age-old question of Thurien-human relations rears its head again. It has a moral dimension: By maintaining their deadly countermeasures, are not the Thuriens betraying their highest ideals? In a bold and thoroughly unexpected way, the new physics Dr. Hunt is developing with his Thurien colleagues may be able to resolve this urgent question.
So, the Thuriens convert the cores of dead stars into energy which they distribute to h-space to power their spaceships and many of their planetary facilities. Those spaceships boost on gravitic drive and transit between star systems using warps produced by toroidal black holes, which their ubiquitous computer network VISAR manufactures at need. VISAR can also link directly to a human brain to provide full-immersion virtual reality. But all this is just background to the story, which revolves around Victor Hunt's random introduction to the possibility of communication between alternate universes (or parallel worlds) and the research project his organization mounts with the help of Thurien scientists to master the techniques. Part I of the book, "The Multiverse," tells how that is accomplished. Then the real work begins: a bold mission to an alternate reality with the goal of preventing the destruction of Minerva that took place in our timeline's prehistory. This mission, described in Part II, depends on their newly acquired technology and an ancient, self-powered starship, the Shapieron. But even these fantastic tools are not enough; in the final crunch, the mission's success rides on Victor Hunt's understanding of good old human (or Jevlenese) nature.
Hogan skillfully blends the high-tech features with clever rule-of-thumb psychology in a plot with plenty of twists that arrives at a very satisfying ending. This novel earns full marks.
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