A while back we wrote about an alien race’s scheme to capture Jupiter (Psst. Want to Buy a Hot Planet?) and haul it out of the solar system. E-Reads happens to carry another book about moving a planet, Greg Bear’s Moving Mars. Aside from the astonishing but completely valid scientific basis for transporting a planet from one locus to another, its a wonderful novel about a young colony yearning to free itself from the influence of the parent world’s exploitive government. The parent world happens to be Earth. And the government is not happy. Not happy at all. Its planning to punish the wayward colonists, and there’s absolutely nothing the populace of the Red Planet can do.

Or is there? There’s this nerdy kid Charles who has a scheme so risky and preposterous that in all likelihood it will blow up in his face like some schoolboy chem lab experiment. Except its not a chem lab. It’s a planet.

Well, how many schoolboys have let that discourage them?

But Casseia believes in him. She’s the rebellious daughter of a conservative family, and she sees Charles’s cockeyed idea as fuel for the student protests she’s leading. It’s hard to imagine a less likely love object than Charles, but maybe Casseia could learn to get attached to someone who thinks he knows how to save their world. Maybe this tender love story explains why it wasn’t just the science fiction reviewers that loved Moving Mars (“…an accomplished, thoroughly mature novel that should be placed at the top of anyone’s ‘to be read’ stack” – Science Fiction Age), but the romance reviewers too (“…a grand adventure in hard science fiction” – Romantic Times).

E-Reads carries a great list of Greg Bear’s backlist titles and there are more to come!

- Richard Curtis

(Above image of Mars courtesy of NASA.)

Aside from the physical force that propels planets around stars, there’s little short of a cataclysmic collision that can move them out of their orbits.  Unless you happen to be a science fiction author with an imagination as far-reaching as a galaxy.  And E-Reads happens to have not one such author but two.

Aside from the astonishing but completely valid scientific basis for transporting a planet from one locus to another, Greg Bear’s Moving Mars is a completely gripping work of fiction. A young colony yearns to free itself from the influence of the parent world’s exploitative government. The parent world happens to be Earth. And the government is not happy. Not happy at all. Its planning to punish the wayward colonists with a barrage of missiles, and there’s absolutely nothing the populace of the Red Planet can do.

Or is there? There’s this nerdy kid Charles who has a scheme so risky and preposterous that in all likelihood it will blow up in his face like some schoolboy chem lab experiment. Except its not a chem lab. It’s a planet.

Well, how many schoolboys have let that discourage them?

But Casseia, the novel’s beautiful and determined heroine, believes in him. She’s the rebellious daughter of a conservative family, and she sees Charles’s cockeyed idea as fuel for the student protests she’s leading. It’s hard to imagine a less likely love object than Charles, but maybe Casseia could learn to get attached to someone who thinks he knows how to save their world. Maybe this tender love story explains why it wasn’t just the science fiction reviewers that loved Moving Mars (“…an accomplished, thoroughly mature novel that should be placed at the top of anyone’s ‘to be read’ stack” – Science Fiction Age), but the romance reviewers too (“…a grand adventure in hard science fiction” – Romantic Times).

Besides Moving Mars, E-Reads carries a great list of Greg Bear’s backlist titles

We said there was a second novel about moving a planet.  In Donald Moffitt’s The Jupiter Theft an alien race schemes to capture the largest satellite and haul it out of the solar system (Psst. Want to Buy a Hot Planet?). About this book we gasped “Moffitt’s concepts dwarf our vocabulary for huge. Colossal, gigantic, immense, mammoth, good words one and all. But they still don’t touch his vision. Astronomical – yes, now we’re getting somewhere. That word seems consonant with the idea of capturing a gaseous planet to use as fuel. Astronomical. That’s Donald Moffitt and that’s The Jupiter Theft.”

Richard Curtis

Michael Valdivieso, in his five-star amazon.com review of The Jupiter Theft, said it as well as anybody: “Donald Moffitt just can’t write about tiny things.” Indeed, Moffitt’s concepts dwarf our vocabulary for huge. Colossal, gigantic, immense, mammoth, good words one and all. But they still don’t touch his vision. Astronomical – yes, now we’re getting somewhere. That word seems consonant with the idea of capturing a gaseous planet to use as fuel. Astronomical. That’s Donald Moffitt and that’s The Jupiter Theft.

This book, Moffitt’s first, was a discovery of the legendary Judy-Lynn Del Rey, and her editorial exchanges with the author, exploring the science behind this tale of a vast alien convoy sweeping inexorably into our solar system, displayed a mind as far-ranging as the author’s.

Moffitt himself is as modest as his mind is cosmic. Had he promoted himself, or had his publishers promoted him, aggressively, he’d have swept a lot of major awards for this and his subsequent novels, all of which E-Reads is in the process of rereleasing.

Read The Jupiter Theft and let me know if I missed any adjectives.

– Richard Curtis

Above photo of Jupiter from NASA’s Voyager 1 mission.

On October 12, 2008, astronaut and video game designer Richard Garriott will be shot into space for a visit to the International Space Station. On board his capsule will be an archive of digitized information intended to tell visitors from other worlds about the great race that was humanity. The scheme is called Operation Immortality. The underlying assumption is a tried and true science fiction theme: that by the time someone reads it, Planet Earth and its inhabitants will have perished.

“The archive will include information on humanity’s greatest achievements,” according to the Operation Immortality website. The file will also carry “messages from people all over the world, and DNA samples from some of our brightest minds and most accomplished athletes. During the month of September, every human being is invited to come to the OperationImmortality.com website to submit their suggestions for our greatest achievements and leave a message for the cosmos.”

Knowledgeable science fiction fans may well wonder if the inspiration for this plan was a pair of novels by Donald Moffitt published in the late 1980s, Genesis Quest and Second Genesis. Unlike the International Space Station, which orbits only a few thousand miles above Earth, Moffitt’s fictional space probe travels for millions of years before ultimately being captured by an alien race that not only manages to decode the information, but uses the code to reconstruct human civilization as well!

E-Reads is proud to publish this amazingly prescient saga and three other Moffitt novels as well. But was he prescient enough to anticipate that two decades later Operation Immortality would enlist such living celebrities as Steven Colbert to contribute their DNA to the project?

You can read about it on the Operation Immortality Celebrity News Page.

– Richard Curtis