Book Review - Encounter with Tiber - Buzz Aldrin and John Barnes.
I saw this book in a local book fair, and thought it would be a great read because of the heritage of the author. It's not everyone who can claim to have stood on the moon and write a science fiction book. It was a great investment, and although it's taken a few months to read, due to only reading it at work in lunch breaks, i have enjoyed it.
The technical details that have gone into the book would normally require an author to put in huge amounts of research and attempt to understand the inner workings of space agencies and legitimate space travel. But here we have Buzz Aldrin himself, he has probably consulted and advised on many other peoples sci-fi works. A man who's life has been all about space travel and astrophysics, and this passion and knowledge comes flooding through in his book.
This book was a refreshing and stimulating, most other books, simply push the character in a spaceship and they blast off to another world or to the moon. but with this book we get treated the the physics, the technology and even the politics of getting a vehicle.outside the atmosphere.
sometimes i felt the book was a little too concerned with interesting and unique view point Buzz can put on a story rather than focusing on a making characters more engaging. I definitely found the chapters of book that were written from the aliens' point of view, unbelievable and naive. The aliens displayed far too many human characteristics and were simply not alien enough for my tastes. But then again they did need to be close to human for the story to work.
In summery, half a brilliant book, if the book had been purely written from the human point of view and only referenced the alien races it would have been a completely brilliant book.(and please, don't show drawings of the aliens, that is why we read, so we can use our imagination and not have imagery forced upon us)
