Endeavor (Sleeping Gods part 1) - Book Review

 I just finished Endeavor (Sleeping Gods, part 1), by Ralph Kern. It is an hard SF novel.

As classical for hard SF, it starts with a ramscoop and drones traveling from Earth to Tau Ceti, and goes exploring, finds plenty of life. Nice. 

Then they discover how to quantum teleport (the destructive kind) and send a gateway, which allows people to go and explore. The quantum teleport is light-speed only, so they effectively jump forward in time. 

Coming back, they discover that gateways are being sent to many other world. Eventually, the crew goes back to another mission - and discovers intelligent life. Then another mission. Now humankind has created Von Neumann gateways (and changed in many ways). And they go to a distant star where they see clear evidence of higher civilizations, and cool super structures. Then they meet aliens.

There is a nice flight into the alien territory, and a cute segment with the Roanoke colony (which appears in so many fiction pieces).

It then ends somewhat well, although I understand that part of the series is over (i.e. the series has parallel stories, not the same people).

Reminded me of Forever War (for obvious reasons, for those who read it), and some others. Pretty well done, exciting themes overall (skipping over time, immortality, von neuman machines, gateway). 

There was also a nice short section talking about the tech in the book, which I always like.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Solved - You have an incorrect version of driver "vmx86.sys" - VMWare Workstation 8

I have just installed VMWare Workstation 8 over my old VMWare Workstation 6.5 on Windows 7. On my first run I already got the error message: Could not get vmx86 driver version: The handle is invalid. You have an incorrect version of driver "vmx86.sys". Try reinstalling VMware Workstation. Failed to initialize monitor device. Obviously, I was concerned, but there is a simple way to solve it - just right-click the VMWare Workstation icon and use Run as Administrator. This is a bit annoying, but at least it is easy to solve. Update: I forgot to mention it, but as Dave said on the comments, you can right-click on the program shortcut, choose Properties, Compatibility tab and check Run as Administrator so that it will always run properly. Thanks, Dave!
Read more

[Fixed] Just Cause 3 Mouse offset

I've sort of "fixed" my mouse offset problems and cursor exits from Just Cause 3. For whatever reason, both seem to happen sometime, specially if I need to change focus from the game. Sometimes just going to another app and returning solves it, otherwise if I go to Options, Graphics, and turn full screen back on (or turn it off and on again), it seems to get fixed. However, still annoying.
Read more

Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master

I've read Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master last week. It was pretty good, although if you have a few years of experience and good practices, you should be familiar with most of what it says, even if you don't follow it in practice :-) . Some of their bullet points are: - Don't duplicate - Write flexible code - Use Contracts, assertions and exceptions - Test - Automate where possible - Use a version control system. Obviously, many of these points have a lot to do with refactoring and XP. They also have another neat book on Automation, Pragmatic Project Automation: How to Build, Deploy, and Monitor Java Apps . Obviously that is much less relevant to a Delphi programmer, but you can still learn quite a bit from it. After I started reading it, I automated large sections of my build and release process (in PHP - it's easy to use in the command-line, too, and some parts are re-usable on the site). It saves a lot of time and enables you to stop worrying if you ...
Read more