Borrowed Tides

I don’t know what to make of Paul Levinson’s Borrowed Tides. Levinson can do hard science, but some of the elements of this book are so farfetched that I think I must be missing something. We have our first crewed voyage to Alpha Centauri. Fine. Of course, there is not enough fuel for the return trip unless they can catch a gravitational slingshot (here called a boomerang) that one crewmember believes in because it is part of Native American mythology. The ship’s captain is qualified only because he has a Ph.D. in the philosophy of science. Sure. When they arrive, they find a habitable planet that does strange things to the mind—rendering one of the crew mute for unexplained reasons. The planet also morphs through its geological show more evolution much too rapidly. As Jack Lumet, an anthropologist specializing in Iroquois folklore, opines, “Nothing about this trip was easy to explain.”
I wonder if Levinson was smoking something intriguing while reading Isaac Asimov’s The Currents of Space. show less

This book asks a lot of interesting philosophical questions, as it deals with a small crew of explorers who set out in a spaceship from Earth to Alpha Centauri who find that their assumptions about space, time, and physics are wrong. A lot of questions are asked, few are answered. If you don't mind the kind of story where the questions take precedence over the plot, this may be okay for you.