 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 Cold War has wound down amid a trend of détente and general disarmament (though the Soviet Union still exists.) 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 interplanetary capability at the time of their destruction, and had only made it as far as Minerva's moon, which they had fortified heavily for their interminable wars. During their final conflict, Minerva was destroyed, and its now gravitationally-unbound moon spiraled inwards towards the inner system, where it was - by a freakish coincidence - gravitationally captured by the Earth and entered into a stable orbit (meaning that Earth's moon is actually the former moon of Minerva.) A very small number of Lunarians - having survived both the final war and the meteoric bombardment of the Moon by the debris of Minerva - manage to descend to the Earth in as few as one remaining spaceship. It is Danchekker who solves the other half of the mystery: the uncanny genetic similarity between Lunarians and humans is accounted for by the fact that 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 or endless warfare, the Lunarians had - upon their arrival on Earth - descended into barbarism, and had rapidly exterminated their less-advanced, less-aggressive terrestrial cousins, the Neanderthals.
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 drive malfunction. It has a similar scientific-mystery structure, in which 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 evolution of the intelligent Lunarians.
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.
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