Cover art by Larry Price
Cauldron is a 2007 science fiction novel by American author Jack McDevitt. It is the sixth novel in the Academy series, featuring Priscilla Hutchins.
Cauldron is a 2007 science fiction novel by American author Jack McDevitt. It is the sixth novel in the Academy series, featuring Priscilla Hutchins.
Humanity now generally disregards spaceflight, and space exploration is in massive decline. Hutchins has retired from flying in space and now spends her days throwing fund-raisers in order to finance space exploration through private investors. The space program is on the edge of being terminated, when a physicist named Jon Silvestri announces that he has completed a much more efficient faster-than-light-speed engine, capable of reaching destinations in mere fractions of the time previously required, travelling much farther than Pluto in just under 8 seconds.
With this new drive, destinations such as the galactic core are mere months of travel away. Hutch and the characters in the novel use that engine to journey to the centre of the galaxy, while making stops at a few points of interest including Sigma 2711, a star system 14,000 light years away and the origin of mankind's only received signal from an alien race, a black hole with a mysterious artificial companion and the supposed home planet of a galaxy-wide surveillance system. But their true mission lies at the heart of the galaxy, the supposed origin of the mysterious Omega Clouds, mysterious clouds of energy that travel through space, attacking and destroying any structure with right angles, at regular 8000-year cycles. As they near their final objective it becomes clear that the true purpose of the clouds is beyond anything any of them could have possibly imagined.
Kirkus Reviews describes the book as "Not peak McDevitt — slow to develop and not especially surprising — but workmanlike and brimming with the author's trademark low-key charms." [1]
Interstellar travel refers to the idea of interstellar probes or crewed spacecraft moving between stars or planetary systems in a galaxy. Interstellar travel would be much more difficult than interplanetary spaceflight. Whereas the distances between the planets in the Solar System are less than 30 astronomical units (AU), the distances between stars are typically hundreds of thousands of AU, and usually expressed in light-years. Because of the vastness of those distances, non-generational interstellar travel based on known physics would need to occur at a high percentage of the speed of light; even so, travel times would be long, at least decades and perhaps millennia or longer.
Interplanetary spaceflight or interplanetary travel is the crewed or uncrewed travel between stars and planets, usually within a single planetary system. In practice, spaceflights of this type are confined to travel between the planets of the Solar System. Uncrewed space probes have flown to all the observed planets in the Solar System as well as to dwarf planets Pluto and Ceres, and several asteroids. Orbiters and landers return more information than fly-by missions. Crewed flights have landed on the Moon and have been planned, from time to time, for Mars and Venus. While many scientists appreciate the knowledge value that uncrewed flights provide, the value of crewed missions is more controversial. Science fiction writers propose a number of benefits, including the mining of asteroids, access to solar power, and room for colonization in the event of an Earth catastrophe.
Jack McDevitt is an American science fiction author whose novels frequently deal with attempts to make contact with alien races, and with archaeology or xenoarchaeology. Most of his books follow either superluminal pilot Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins or galactic relic hunters Alex Benedict and Chase Kolpath. McDevitt has received numerous nominations for Hugo, Nebula, and John W. Campbell awards. Seeker won the 2006 Nebula Award for Best Novel.
Galactic empires are a common trope used in science fantasy and science fiction, particularly in works known as 'space operas'. Many authors have either used a galaxy-spanning empire as background or written about the growth and/or decline of such an empire. The capital of a galactic empire is frequently a core world, such as a planet relatively close to a galaxy's supermassive black hole, which has advanced considerably in science and technology compared to current human civilization. Characterizations can vary wildly from malevolent forces attacking sympathetic victims to apathetic bureaucracies to more reasonable entities focused on social progress and anywhere in between.
A sleeper ship is a hypothetical type of crewed spacecraft in which most or all of the crew spend the journey in some form of hibernation or suspended animation. The only known technology that allows long-term suspended animation of humans is the freezing of early-stage human embryos through embryo cryopreservation, which is behind the concept of embryo space colonization.
An irregular galaxy is a galaxy that does not have a distinct regular shape, unlike a spiral or an elliptical galaxy. Irregular galaxies do not fall into any of the regular classes of the Hubble sequence, and they are often chaotic in appearance, with neither a nuclear bulge nor any trace of spiral arm structure.
2061: Odyssey Three is a science-fiction novel by the British writer Arthur C. Clarke, published in 1987. It is the third book in Clarke's Space Odyssey series. It returns to one of the lead characters of the previous novels, Heywood Floyd, and his adventures from the 2061 return of Halley's Comet to Jupiter's moon Europa.
Forever Free is a science fiction novel by American author Joe Haldeman, the sequel to The Forever War. It was published in 1999.
A Stargate is an Einstein–Rosen bridge portal device within the Stargate fictional universe that allows practical, rapid travel between two distant locations. The devices first appeared in the 1994 Roland Emmerich film Stargate, and thereafter in the television series Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis, and Stargate Universe. In these productions, the Stargate functions as a plot device, allowing the main characters to visit alien planets without the need for spaceships or any other type of technology. The device allows for near-instantaneous travel across both interstellar and extragalactic distances.
Manifold: Space is a science fiction book by British author Stephen Baxter, first published in the United Kingdom in 2000, then released in the United States in 2001. It is the second book of the Manifold series and examines another possible solution to the Fermi paradox. Although it is in no sense a sequel to the first book it contains a number of the same characters, notably protagonist Reid Malenfant, and similar artefacts. The Manifold series contains four books, Manifold: Time, Manifold: Space, Manifold: Origin, and Phase Space.
The planetary systems of stars other than the Sun and the Solar System are a staple element in many works of the science fiction genre.
A Talent for War is a science fiction mystery novel by American writer Jack McDevitt, the story of a search by Alex Benedict, the protagonist, to discover the nature of a mysterious project Alex's uncle had been working on when the interstellar passenger ship, on which his uncle was a passenger, was lost in space. This investigation leads deep into the history of a war between human civilization and a neighboring alien civilization and challenges the foundation mythos of the current human government.
"Encounter in the Dawn" is a short story by English writer Arthur C. Clarke, first published in 1953 in the magazine Amazing Stories. It was originally collected in the anthology Expedition to Earth, and, in one edition of the book, is titled "Expedition to Earth". In a later collection the title "Encounter at Dawn" is used. The story was later restyled and used as the basis for the first section of Clarke's 1968 novel 2001 A Space Odyssey.
Odyssey is a science fiction novel by American writer Jack McDevitt. It was a Nebula Award nominee for 2007. It is set in the 23rd century and "explores the immorality of big business and the short-sightedness of the American government in minimizing support for space travel."
Omega is a book by Jack McDevitt that won the John W. Campbell Award, and was nominated for the Nebula Award in 2004.
Chindi is a 2002 book by Jack McDevitt of starship pilot Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins series.
Space travel under constant acceleration is a proposed mode of space travel. It requires that the propulsion system operate continuously with a steady acceleration, rather than the brief impulsive thrusts used by chemical rockets. For the first half of the journey it constantly pushes the spacecraft towards its destination, and for the second half of the journey it constantly uses back thrust, so that the spaceship arrives at the destination at a standstill. Constant-acceleration travel attaining relativistic speeds is a physically plausible mechanism for human interstellar travel.
An intergalactic star, also known as an intracluster star or a rogue star, is a star not gravitationally bound to any galaxy. Although a source of much discussion in the scientific community during the late 1990s, intergalactic stars are now generally thought to have originated in galaxies, like other stars, before being expelled as the result of either galaxies colliding or of a multiple-star system traveling too close to a supermassive black hole, which are found at the center of many galaxies.
The Engines of God is a science fiction novel by American author Jack McDevitt.
The Boy Who Would Live Forever is a science fiction novel by the American writer Frederik Pohl. It was published in 2004 by Tor. It is about intrigues involving one of Pohl's recurring creations, the Heechee universe. The Heechee are a fictional alien race which developed advanced technologies, including interstellar space travel, but then disappeared. In the novel, humans use abandoned Heechee starships to explore space, while the Heechee aliens hide from a mysterious foe, the Kugel, in a black hole, all the while pursued by hate-crazed humans who are Heechee hunters.