Gift from the Stars
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- Synopsis
- Gift from the Stars is a science fiction novel by James Gunn first written as a series of connected novelettes in Analog and then published as a novel in 2005. It deals with the same theme as that in Carl Sagan's novel Contact, spaceship plans received in signals from the stars, but it provides what Gunn considers a more realistic extrapolation. About the romanticism and easy adventure highlighted in Sagan's novel, Gunn in his preface writes as follows: That isn't the way it would happen, I told myself, and I was "inspired" to write Gift from the Stars, a response not only to Contact but to every novel of humans encountering the unknown. I wrote it as a series of novelettes, just as I had written The Listeners, and published them over a period of half a dozen years in Analog, beginning with "The Giftie," which won the Analog readers' poll for best novelette of the year. I have kept that pattern in the book, even though I planned it from the beginning as a novel exploring "the way it would really be." It is a novel in six parts instead of a dozen or so chapters. If aliens sent us plans for a spaceship, the novel suggests, they would arrive without fanfare and their arrival would be greeted not with surprise or joy or gratitude, but with suspicion and resistance. A few space enthusiasts would want to implement them to reach the stars, but the great masses of humanity-and the bureaucrats who make decisions for them-would ignore the plans or want to suppress them. Most of all, why would aliens send us spaceship plans? Are their intentions beneficent or inimical? Damon Knight raised the question in a classic shortshort story entitled "To Serve Man," but Gift from the Stars pursues the question in detail and arrives at an answer, like the spaceship the humans construct and name Ad Astra Per Aspera. "To the stars through difficulty." Gift from the Stars is a more light-hearted look at the issues of alien contact-the plans, for instance, are discovered as an appendix in a book on a UFO remainder table-and I enjoyed writing them and living with the characters: Adrian Mast, Frances Farmstead, Jessica Buhler, and the troubled genius Peter Cavendish.
- Copyright:
- 2005
Book Details
- Book Quality:
- Excellent
- Book Size:
- 184 Pages
- ISBN-13:
- 9781932100655
- Publisher:
- N/A
- Date of Addition:
- 07/02/07
- Copyrighted By:
- James Gunn
- Adult content:
- No
- Language:
- English
- Has Image Descriptions:
- No
- Categories:
- Literature and Fiction, Science Fiction and Fantasy
- Submitted By:
- Roger Drewicke
- Proofread By:
- Helen Chang
- Usage Restrictions:
- This is a copyrighted book.