Rogue Star by Michael Flynn - Boor Report #164

15/15/2016

I am not sure how I feel about meeting my reading goal for the year.  I goodly chunk of it has been from audio books.  Does that make it wrong?  It's not like I didn't "consume" it, it's just that I didn't do so with my eyes.  It feels a little bit like cheating.

Audio books are certainly trending with the public, it is a real growth area of literature.  Amazon's Audible, and audio books in general, have enjoyed a 20% increase in sales in 2015 over 2014.  So I guess I am on-trend in that regard.

Okay, that said how was the book?

Fantastic!

I must say that Flynn has mastered the "literary" hard science fiction genre.  His characters are brilliantly true-to-life, they feel like real people; driven and flawed like all of us.

The book continues from the first seamlessly even though it skips ahead a bit, with the Far Trip mission nearing its destination and the construction of the LEO space station in full swing.

Throughout the book are the messy, human shenanigans that are so common in life.

I have to say that Flynn's depiction of humanity in space was a far better read than Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy.  But it occupies the same, distinct part of science fiction that cannot be ignored; that of the well-researched and plausible speculation that is so important in sparking the imagination.

Flynn's ability to keep the plot moving is what sets his work above Robinson's as he was able to keep my attention.

This book is nearly 20 years old and the only detail it departs with reality is the level of sub-orbital and low earth orbit activity that takes place.  Nothing in the book is out of the realm of the possible.

I was simply captivated by the story.

I must say something about the narrator, Malcolm Hillgartner.  This guy was terrific, his ability with voices and accents was staggering.  There are so many characters in these books that I was completely impressed with how he was able to keep them straight and to recall them.

He brought the whole thing to life.

Michael Flynn

Malcolm Hillgartner

Firestar by Michael Flynn - Book Report #156

Audio book cover

08/15/2016

I read this book a long time ago, see book report #52

It has been over three years since I read the first installment in the Firestar series.  I thought it would be a good idea to relive that book in audio form with the intention of listening to the entire series.

After reading my original thoughts on the book I am looking forward to my enjoyment of it now.  In the intervening years Elon Musk and SpaceX have made great strides in the expansion of commercial access to space so it will be interesting to compare how close his path has come to the this particular story.

It was a 30+ hour investment in listening to the book.  My goodness was it good.  I would call it literary science fiction.  It really was grounded in the here and now.  It had all the frustrations of naysayers, political influence, financial realities, personal and professional rivalries.

It really is a massive subject if you want to try to capture almost every aspect of pushing humanity off the face of the earth.  It is made more challenging by making it a private effort which adds the governmental challenges that can be encountered.

I found the characters believable and well rounded.  Some were frustratingly stubborn, just like real people.

What struck me was how the endeavor becomes exponentially more complex as you move forward.

This feels like an important book to read if you are interested in today's space program.  Much like the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson it deals with the known realities of the day.  In this book Flynn does not push the technological speculation very far beyond what was know and proven.  He took results from NASA's X-plane program and pushed them into production instead of the reality of cancelled programs.  Which is much like the environment of today's commercial space efforts who are mining the past efforts of NASA and turning them into private companies.

It's all very exciting.

Paperback cover

Michael Flynn

Book Report #52 - Firestar by Michael Flynn

This book was first published in 1996, set mostly in the opening years of the 21st century, it suffered a bit from being dated. Some of the technology that we take for granted today was absent from the book. That kind of thing is never a deal-breaker in fiction; it was just something I noticed.

There is a lot of very good reviews of the book on the Amazon website and ill direct you there:

Amazon.ca reviews

For my part I found the book a bit disappointing only in that it lacked in the gee-wiz technology factor. This book was firmly locked in the "here and now" of technology. I guess I was hoping to see more advancement in space commerce than was shown in the book.

You have to remember that I was born in the mid-60's and grew up with the Apollo program, so I come at this topic with great sadness at the opportunities lost in my lifetime. And that's the hook of the book, our main character Mariesa van Huyten is a captain of industry who nearly single-handily takes on the project of getting humanity back into space, permanently.

Flynn turned over every rock imaginable in such a project. I thought it would be a simple book centring around the engineering of it and that there would be some kind of adventure thrown in that would justify the whole endeavor.

What I got was a book that neatly walks the line between science fiction and literary fiction. There is political interference, corporate spying, social impact, emotional drama, family conflict, betrayals, perseverance and some technological speculation.

It was a very thoughtful, insightful and thorough book. It was, for me, a challenge to get through; it came in at 885 pages and is only the first book in a series of four. (Thank God each succeeding book gets shorter!) Anybody who reads this blog knows I have a 350 page theoretical limit to novels. It took some effort, on my part, to keep picking it up but, once I was about, oddly enough, 350 pages in, I found the rhythm of it and found myself reading at every opportunity.

I loved the book, in the end, and I look forward to the second volume; Rogue Star.