by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright Dec 2010
"The Honeycomb Comet" is a collection of stories built on the premise that mankind will travel to the stars, but not using a faster-than-light technology such as the space opera genre's now-famous warp drives.
Instead White has crafted stories in which mankind uses constant acceleration slower-than-light drives. "This presented a big challenge." says White, "These stories had to span decades, not a just a few hours, and still be interesting.
"I took on this challenge for two reasons: First, we are unlikely to have warp drives, so stories using them are as realistic as stories with maidens riding unicorns. Second, if you have warp drives then Sirius becomes just another LA suburb, and the experiences of interstellar travel becomes pretty ho-hum, not pretty exotic."
Humans may not have warp drives, but there is plenty of high tech magic in these stories. The book opens with John Boromov, a crusty Belter prospector, discovering an abandoned fragment an ancient alien starship drifting through the Kuiper Belt, and that fragment is filled with civilization changing technologies. The book chronicles the adventure as mankind moves from discovering this ancient fragment to discovering that the alien it came from is moon-sized, to having one of these moon-sized aliens, still alive, come close to Earth!
"These HX aliens are not just alive," says White, "They are an ecosystem, just as the human body is. In my Honeycomb Comet world, humans are a mosquito to these HX aliens. Humans come, and try to suck off civilization changing treasure, and the aliens try to swat them when they do.
"And when I say civilization changing, I mean just that. Think of living our lives without pizza sauce or ketchup or french fries. If Columbus hadn't discovered America - home of the tomato and the potato - that's how Europe would be today. That's the kind of change I mean when I say civilization changing."
These stories are about the people who deal with these exciting events - some can't wait to exploit these opportunities, some fear that nothing but trouble can come to mankind from tampering with these creatures from the stars and their forbidden treasures.
It's a fun series of stories, and like all White's Tales of Technofiction books, told in a very different fashion from conventional science fiction story lines.
If you want to read a different kind of science fiction, one in which good science is as important as good characters and a good story, you'll like this.
-- The End --