Encounter with Tiber
by
Buzz Aldrin and John Barnes
Time/Warner Books, 1996

This, for anyone excited by the prospect of space travel, is an inspirational book. Aldrin and Barnes have combined to give us a lesson in the problems attendant on the project of interstellar travel, but have done it in an attractive fictional package with characters of a believable nature, even when extra-terrestrial in origin. In fact believability is the hallmark of this remarkable book, in a field that has spawned many unbelievable entries in the past.

As with all excellent science fiction, in my view at least, this book combines great adventure with solid science to arrive at an eminently believable story. There is of course, plenty of speculative science included, from space sails to spun diamond ropes, but, none of it is wildly fantastic. All of it seems within the realms of the possible. Perhaps the achievement of near light speed was stretching my credulity somewhat, but the authors linked an explanation of why Einstein's theory disallows exceeding this limit and why approaching it is hard to believe in. They suggest that the worst effects don't really come into play in a big way until you get very close to the limit, and that therefore we may entertain the prospect of getting close. And, of course, that is crucial to believable interstellar travel.

There are really two story lines in this book. One describes in great detail a fictional culture on a planet, Tiber (the local name) or Nisu (the Nisuan name) in the Alpha Centaurian system, while the other projects a possible relatively near future for us. There is a little unbelievability here. The idea that the nearest star system to us would also include a technologically advanced culture. Anyway the details of the history of this fictional culture are fascinating, even though and perhaps too obviously based on the racial problems of our species. On the other hand, there is nothing wrong with suggesting that this is likely to be a universal experience. None the less I felt it to be a projection and over done, that is taking up too great a number of pages.

The next problem I had with the book was the injection of the democratic/communist controversy into the alien culture. Finally, why the inclusion of an arbitrary variation of human sexuality?

The answer to all of these questions is probably the effort to attach human emotions and therefore interest to these aliens. But, it wasn't a transparent effort, and it needs to be. The hacking and sawing of the novelist are all too apparent here.

However, the novel's strengths are too great to spend too much time on these quibbles. In my case, the book was, as the old saw goes, "thought provoking", which I would say is the most important quality of any written work. I personally had just about dismissed the possibility of interstellar travel from my inventory of possible futures. This book has caused me to reconsider that question. In fact, this book, along with a coincidental and inspiring artistic production in the current National Geographic (human evolution) has caused me to crystallize in my own mind what I will be investigating next. This is the best kind of result one could hope for from a book.

To consider this book in terms of the philosophy of this home page, we would have to say that this is an entry in the great debate about the future of masculinist aggression. Will we continue to develop technology and use it to spread our species throughout the galaxy? Or, will we accept that it is too threatening to our future survival and too expensive and give up the idea of invading other planets? In my view the issue is survival. If emigration is the only way to achieve it, then that becomes our moral responsibility. But, if that is the case, it will certainly be an exceedingly tricky business and only too likely to fail, as the authors point out.

We should reflect on the fact that NASA and other human institutions have demonstrated beyond serious debate that interplanetary travel is possible, if somewhat time consuming, and that less than a century after devising a viable airplane. So, to doubt that interstellar travel is within reach would seem to be particularly short sighted.