One of the advantages of reviewing an older series of books is that unless your readers have been living under a rock, they already know the basic storyline: Dave Bowman and Frank Poole fly to Jupiter and HAL, their hyper-intelligent computer, tries to kill them.  Pretty straight forward, or is…

The first contact was quiet, obscure, and by any conventional standard quite unremarkable.  It required only a breath.  Whatever concept scientists, writers, and other visionaries of the ages may have had about the event, this wasn’t it. I wouldn’t call it serendipitous, that first contact.  It was not, by definition,…

Yesterday I read an article that said that the Voyager I spacecraft, launched in 1979, is now 11 billion miles from the sun.  Eleven billion miles.  That’s 11,000,000,000 miles.  A very long way from home.  Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy adds some perspective: “Space,” it says,…