Back in the mid 1990s I read a science fiction novel called The Killing Star by George Zebrowski and Charles Pellegrino. It's not giving anything away to say that it starts with almost all life on Earth more advanced than a microbe being wiped out by a rain of relitavistic projectiles launched by a supremely paranoid alien race. It starts out grim and it gets grimmer.
But along the way, the authors manage to create one of the most fascinating stories that I've read in a long time, with AIs, advanced genetic engineering bringing ancient religious figures to life, recreating the Titanic in VR, and the Fermi Paradox and why aliens should wipe out the human race. All this in a book that was written more than 25 years ago but has hardly dated at all and reads like it could have been written last year.
The Killing Star has gained some notoriety among SETI researchers; I've seen it mentioned in several articles in the last few years. It even has its own Wikipedia page. That made me want to reread it to see if my memory of the book would hold up, but it's out of print and I no longer have my paperback copy. It is available as an audiobook, which is how I ended up rereading it. I don't know why it's not in print as an ebook when so much crappier junk gets republished in that format.
I can't recommend The Killing Star highly enough. It's not a perfect book, in a couple of places it descents into goshwow space opera territory, but it has a higher idea density that almost anything current I can think of. (Vernor Vinge and Karl Schroeder come to mind here). And the ideas are beautifully worked out through the story line and main characters. If it were being published for the first time today, it would be a solid contender for the major SF awards.
1 comment:
Well, the Merril Collection has it, of course, but only a reference copy.
I suspect the biggest thing standing in the way of reissuing older titles as ebooks is the expense of converting them. Putting a text file (or files) in a three-decade-old format into epub format is probably going to cost more than the authors want to pay. Assuming the authors even got the rights back when the book went OP.
Speaking of epub, you asked, in a comment on Quipu, about how I build mine, and I didn't respond. I wasn't being rude, I was being stupid: it's taken me the better part of a year to figure out how Blogger's comment system works. Sorry about that.
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