Hello. This will be the new home for over 800 book reviews that I have written between 1997 and the end of 2010. They used to be found at http://www.deadtreesreview.com/, but that site will be discontinued.

My newer reviews will be found at http://www.deadtreesreview.blogspot.com/.








Monday, May 21, 2012

Camelot 30K

Camelot 30K, Robert L. Forward, Tor Books, 1993

This is a science fiction story about an international manned mission sent to the Oort Cloud (an immense cloud of comets surrounding our solar system, but far beyond Pluto) to investigate signs of life found by earlier unmanned probes. They find an intelligent civilization, with cities, of beings who look like prawns, called keracks. The question for the humans is to find the power source for the civilization, with the only natural light being ambient starlight. The 30K in the title refers to degrees Kelvin, a measure of temperature. Water freezes at 273K.

The humans learn a lot of interesting things about the keracks with the help of Merlene, a kerack wizard from the city of Camalor, including the fact that the city is sitting on a self-created time bomb.

For those who like lots of science with their fiction, Robert Forward is one of the best in the field, and this book is no exception. For everyone else, this book can be skipped.
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