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Loading... Half Life (1999)by Hal Clement
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Neither the scenario, nor the basic structure of the mission, nor the resolution feel particularly believable. Still, this book had potential to be pretty good--Clement gives us a reasonably interesting story that offers surprises and makes complex chemistry feel important. Unfortunately I never really cared about what happened to any of the large cast of largely undifferentiated characters. no reviews | add a review
The human race on Earth is in trouble, perhaps facing extinction. A crew of young people travel to the moons of Saturn to investigate the biochemistry of the pre-life conditions there in the hope of discovering something that might save Earth. They race to find answers with death close behind, and gaining. Half Life is pure hard SF adventure, and Clement is at his best. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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The expedition consists of fifty people, both men and women, most of them suffering from one terminal disease or another. Twenty-one are still alive by the time they are in orbit over Titan and have their space station operational. This is where the story really starts, and most of the action is discussion. For the most part, the members of the expedition stay in sealed quarters, having no direct contact with each other, and only rarely venturing out physically to the surface of Titan. They operate equipment via waldoes and virtual reality.
All of this creates a sense of distance from both the action and the characters that's hard to shake. Titan is an interesting intellectual puzzle, and so, sometimes, are the motives of the characters, but I felt little sense of emotional involvement in their problems. Granted that one expects a Hal Clement book to emphasize the intellectual over the emotional; this book seemed significantly more tilted that way than, say, Mission of Gravity, or Iceworld, or Close to Critical. ( )