 Cover of Inherit The Stars, the first book in the series | |
| Author | James P. Hogan |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Darrell K. Sweet |
| Genre | Science fiction |
| Publisher | Del Rey Books, Baen Books |
| Published | 1977–2005 |
| Media type | |
| No. of books | 5 (List of books) |
The Giants series (also known as the Minerva series) is a quintet of science fiction novels by James P. Hogan, published between 1977 and 2005.
Inherit the Stars, the first entry in the series (and Hogan's first novel) was essentially a scientific mystery, with no antagonist or conflict as such. Instead, it followed a group of researchers who found themselves faced with a seemingly insuperable paradox: the discovery that an advanced human civilization had flourished in the Solar System fifty thousand years ago, despite having left no traces on Earth. Hogan' plots made heavy use of Velikovskian catastrophism and Dänikean ancient-astronaut theory, but attempted to base them on a rigorous natural-sciences foundation.
In the introduction to the omnibus The Two Moons, Hogan revealed that Inherit the Stars was inspired by a viewing of the seminal 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, which he had enjoyed until the ending. After complaining to his colleagues at work about the confusing and effects-heavy nature of the conclusion, each of them bet him five pounds that he couldn't write and publish a science-fiction novel. The result was Inherit the Stars, published by Del Rey Books in May 1977. According to Hogan, he later met Arthur C. Clarke and took the opportunity to ask him about the ending of 2001, to which Clarke replied that while the ending of Hogan's Inherit the Stars made more sense, the ending of 2001 had made more money. [1]
The series was originally intended as a closely-linked trilogy, but Hogan eventually returned to the setting with two follow-ons. [2]
These were assembled in several omnibus editions and collections:
In his introduction to The Two Worlds, Hogan hinted at the possibility of a sixth book, but added that there was "nothing definite in the works"; [3] there were no further additions to the series before his passing in 2010.
Inherit the Stars begins in 2027, as humanity is experiencing a minor golden age. The world is at peace, and while the Soviet Union still exists the Cold War has wound down amid a trend of détente and general disarmament. There has been a great deal of technological progress, including clean fusion power, environmental remediation, fast transit, and cheap access to space; a United Nations space agency is spearheading an aggressive program of exploration of the solar system. One of its lunar survey crews stumbles upon a desiccated, space-suited body in a small cavern on the moon, a minor mystery which rapidly becomes a major one when testing reveals that the corpse (nicknamed "Charlie") is 50,000 years old. The technology of the spacesuit is similar to that of Earth in the late 2020s, but is obviously the product of a completely different technological civilization: for convenience, scientists label Charlie's people "Lunarians," though it is obvious that they did not originate from the Moon.
In time, the UN Space Arm discovers additional evidence of Lunarian occupancy on the Moon 50,000 years ago, including ruined bases, more human remains, and enough examples of Lunarian writing to decipher their language. The translated materials demonstrate that the Lunarian were - despite being genetically indistinguishable from humans - not native to Earth; their records of their home describe a much colder world, with a year lasting 1700 days, enormous ice caps, and continental outlines completely unlike those of Earth. This creates a great deal of scientific controversy, given the evolutionary impossibility of a single species arising independently in two discrete locations. Additionally, it is discovered that the Lunarian bases on the moon were destroyed in an enormous paroxysm of violence, with evidence of the widespread use of nuclear weapons. A simultaneous expedition to the asteroid belt establishes it to comprise the remnants of an Earth-sized planet, which is given the name "Minerva," and which seems to match the records of the Lunarians' homeworld. Those records describe it as a world being slowly strangled by an ice age, dominated by two totalitarian regimes engaged in constant warfare and sinking all its remaining civilizational energies into an attempt to evacuate its elites to the much more habitable Pleistocene Earth. Charlie's diary includes a description of the last of these wars, which was sufficiently cataclysmic in nature to have not only destroyed Lunarian civilization, but had (via widespread use of antimatter-based energy weapons) destabilized the inner structure of Minerva so badly that the planet exploded.
However, some of the available data points remain irreconcilable: how could identically human beings evolve independently on both Earth and Minerva, and how could the Lunarians transported an enormous amount of military material to Earth's moon, but failed to make the crossing to Earth itself? The situation is partially resolved by the discovery of an enormous spaceship buried beneath the ice of Ganymede. Far more advanced than anything the Lunarians had been capable of building, the ship proves to be twenty-five million years old, and to have been crewed by three-meter-tall beings who are clearly completely unrelated to terrestrial life. However, the so-called Ganymeans can be related to samples of canned fish found in the ruined Lunarian lunar bases, suggesting they were both part of the same evolutionary line, and had both evolved on Minerva, of which the Ganymeans must have been the true natives. Biological samples found in the ship demonstrate they had introduced Earth plant and animal life to Minerva as part of an unsuccessful geoengineering project, and that the Lunarians must have evolved on Minerva from higher primates transplanted there by the Ganymeans.
The two foremost scientists of the investigation team, physicist Dr. Victor Hunt and biologist Professor Christian Danchekker, develop competing theories to explain the paradox, and therefore find themselves initially at odds; however, they are also both deeply committed to the scientific method and the pursuit of truth, and eventually develop a rapport and a deep mutual respect for one another. They each wind up solving one half of the mystery: Hunt realizes that the Lunarians did not have reliable interplanetary capability at the time of their destruction, and had only made it as far as Minerva's moon, which they had fortified heavily due to their interminable wars. During their final conflict, Minerva was destroyed, and its now gravitationally-unbound moon spiraled towards the inner system, where it was - by a freakish coincidence - gravitationally captured by the Earth, entering into a stable orbit (meaning that Earth's present moon is actually the former moon of Minerva.) A very small number of Lunarian survivors of both the final war and the meteoric bombardment of the Moon by the debris of Minerva managed to descend to the Earth, in as few as one remaining spaceship.
Meanwhile, Danchekker solves the other half of the mystery: the uncanny genetic similarity between Lunarians and humans is accounted for by the fact that all modern humans are descended entirely from these Lunarian survivors. Endowed with a vicious survival instinct by the unforgiving environment of Minerva and further whetted by their history of warfare, the Lunarians had - upon their arrival on Earth - descended into barbarism and exterminated their less-advanced, less-aggressive terrestrial cousins, the Neanderthals.
The sequel The Gentle Giants of Ganymede concerns the return to the Solar System of an ancient Ganymean spaceship, which had been trapped in a bubble of time dilation by a malfunction in its Alcubierre drive. The novel shares the first volume's scientific-mystery structure, but this time the theme is predominantly biological, as Hunt, Danchekker, and other humans join the Ganymean survivors in untangling the confusing evolutionary history of Minerva between its abandonment by the Ganymeans and the emergence of the Lunarians.
Volume three, Giants' Star, begins three months after the Ganymeans have left the Solar System in search of survivors of their kind, at a possible colony identified in ancient Lunarian star maps. Shortly after their departure, strange faster-than-light messages begin being transmitted to Earth - in English, revealing that humanity has been under surveillance for some time. Confusingly, the messages also reveal that their senders' understanding of the situation on Earth is seriously flawed, and that they are not the surveilling party, whose notice they are attempting to avoid. Earth governments react to the messages with a reversion to factionalism, with the US and USSR attempting to establish separate lines of communication with the senders in hopes of obtaining advanced technology. Unlike the preceding entries in the series, this is something of a thriller, with political subterfuge and a seeming resurrection of the Cold War.
The series is notable for its creation of a substantial prehistory of the Solar System, stretching back millions of years. This was further expanded in later books to include an alternate-universe version of the setting, [4] which included an elaborate fictional chronology:
Events in the alternate chronology are identical up to 50,020 years ago. In this chronology, the Minerva Mission used timeline lensing generated by the Shapieron to cause the Jevlenese to disappear from the alternate timeline universe without a trace. Cerios and Lambia gave up the conflict and disarmed to concentrate on a space program for their mutual benefit. The Shapieron then returned to its own universe.
The reception of the series has been divided; the original trilogy is generally well received, while the later books have been seen as unnecessary additions, suffering from many of the faults of Hogan's later work. In John Clute's article on Hogan's work, he first considered Inherit the Stars, noting "the exhilarating sense it conveys of scientific minds at work on real problems and ... the genuinely exciting scope of the sf imagination it deploys." However, he described the magical aspects of the Entoverse as "nonsense" and complained that the attempted rescue of Minerva was unsatisfying, adding that there was a "willingness on Hogan's part to re-activate sequences that had come to a natural halt." However, he concluded that "the sequence as a whole remains his best work." [5]
James Nicoll remembered enjoying Inherit the Stars when he was a teenager but he had stopped reading the sequence after the first three books, as "[n]othing I have heard about Entoverse (the one I missed) makes me want to hunt it down." He went on to write a derisive early review of Mission to Minerva, where he concluded that "[o]verall, there was an ok novella trying to escape from this. Nothing in this book beyond the identity of the author required it to be so very, very bad." [6]
In 1981, Inherit the Stars won the Seiun Award for Best Foreign Language Novel of the Year and Entoverse went on to win the 1994 Seiun Award in the same category. A manga adaptation by Yukinobu Hoshino was published in 2011–2012 in Japan, which won the Seiun Award of Comics category in 2013.
The Galilean moons, or Galilean satellites, are the four largest moons of Jupiter: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. They are the most readily visible Solar System objects after the unaided visible Saturn, the dimmest of the classical planets, allowing observation with common binoculars, even under night sky conditions of high light pollution. The invention of the telescope enabled the discovery of the moons in 1610. Through this, they became the first Solar System objects discovered since humans have started tracking the classical planets, and the first objects to be found to orbit any planet beyond Earth.
Ganymede, or Jupiter III, is the largest and most massive natural satellite of Jupiter and in the Solar System. It is the largest Solar System object without a substantial atmosphere, despite being the only moon in the Solar System with a substantial magnetic field. Like Titan, Saturn's largest moon, it is larger than the planet Mercury, but has somewhat less surface gravity than Mercury, Io, or the Moon due to its lower density compared to the three.
The mediocrity principle is the philosophical notion that "if an item is drawn at random from one of several sets or categories, it's more likely to come from the most numerous category than from any one of the less numerous categories". The principle has been taken to suggest that there is nothing very unusual about the evolution of the Solar System, Earth's history, the evolution of biological complexity, human evolution, or any one nation. It is a heuristic in the vein of the Copernican principle, and is sometimes used as a philosophical statement about the place of humanity. The idea is to assume mediocrity, rather than starting with the assumption that a phenomenon is special, privileged, exceptional, or even superior.
The concept of self-replicating spacecraft, as envisioned by mathematician John von Neumann, has been described by futurists and has been discussed across a wide breadth of hard science fiction novels and stories. Self-replicating probes are sometimes referred to as von Neumann probes. Self-replicating spacecraft would in some ways either mimic or echo the features of living organisms or viruses.
In planetary astronomy and astrobiology, the Rare Earth hypothesis argues that the origin of life and the evolution of biological complexity, such as sexually reproducing, multicellular organisms on Earth, and subsequently human intelligence, required an improbable combination of astrophysical and geological events and circumstances. According to the hypothesis, complex extraterrestrial life is an improbable phenomenon and likely to be rare throughout the universe as a whole. The term "Rare Earth" originates from Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe (2000), a book by Peter Ward, a geologist and paleontologist, and Donald E. Brownlee, an astronomer and astrobiologist, both faculty members at the University of Washington.
In Arthur C. Clarke's Space Odyssey series, Monoliths are machines in black cuboids whose sides extend in the precise ratio of 1 : 4 : 9 (12 : 22 : 32) built by an unseen extraterrestrial species whom Clarke dubbed the Firstborn and who he suggests are the earliest highly intelligent species to evolve in the Milky Way. In the series of novels (and the films based on these), three Monoliths are discovered in the Solar System by australopithecines and their human descendants. The characters' responses to their discoveries drives the plot of the series and influences its fictional history, particularly by encouraging humanity to progress with technological development.
The Noon Universe is a fictional future setting for a number of hard science fiction novels written by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. The universe is named after Noon: 22nd Century, chronologically the first novel from the series and referring to humanity reaching its noon in the 22nd century.
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Stellar engineering is a type of engineering concerned with creating or modifying stars through artificial means.
Jupiter, the largest planet in the Solar System, has appeared in works of fiction across several centuries. The way the planet has been depicted has evolved as more has become known about its composition; it was initially portrayed as being entirely solid, later as having a high-pressure atmosphere with a solid surface underneath, and finally as being entirely gaseous. It was a popular setting during the pulp era of science fiction. Life on the planet has variously been depicted as identical to humans, larger versions of humans, and non-human. Non-human life on Jupiter has been portrayed as primitive in some works and more advanced than humans in others.
There is evidence that the formation of the Solar System began about 4.6 billion years ago with the gravitational collapse of a small part of a giant molecular cloud. Most of the collapsing mass collected in the center, forming the Sun, while the rest flattened into a protoplanetary disk out of which the planets, moons, asteroids, and other small Solar System bodies formed.
The Psychotechnic League is a future history created by American science fiction writer Poul Anderson. The name "Psychotechnic League" was invented by Sandra Miesel during the early 1980s, to capitalize on Anderson's better-known Polesotechnic League future history. Anderson published 21 novels, novellas and short stories set in this future between 1949 and 1957, with a 22nd published in 1968.
The Planetary series of stories by Stanley G. Weinbaum is a series of short stories, published in Wonder Stories and Astounding Stories in the 1930s, which are set upon various planets and moons of the Solar System.
William Greenleaf is an American author. He was born in Illinois, spent most of his life in southern Arizona, and now lives in New Mexico near Santa Fe. He is a graduate of Arizona State University and worked as a corporate strategic and financial planner before changing careers to become a novelist, freelance book editor, and creative writing instructor.
Ancient astronauts have been addressed frequently in science fiction and horror fiction. Occurrences in the genres include:
Alien Legacy is a sci-fi strategy game developed by Ybarra Productions and published by Sierra On-Line in 1994 for MS-DOS.
A subsatellite, also known as a submoon or a moonmoon, is a "moon of a moon" or a hypothetical natural satellite that orbits the moon of a planet.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to the Solar System:
Death's End is a science fiction novel by the Chinese writer Liu Cixin. It is the third novel in the trilogy titled Remembrance of Earth's Past, following the Hugo Award-winning novel The Three-Body Problem and its sequel, The Dark Forest. The original Chinese version was published in 2010. Ken Liu translated the English edition in 2016. It was a finalist for the 2017 Hugo Award for Best Novel and winner of the 2017 Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel.