New Earth-Like Exoplanet Could Be Discovery of the Century

From Gizmodo

In what’s being hailed as one of the biggest astronomical discoveries of the century, scientists with the European Southern Observatory (ESO) today confirmed the discovery of an Earth-like exoplanet in the habitable zone of Proxima Centauri—our nearest neighboring star. Details of the team’s discovery were just published in Nature.

Rumors of a possible Earth-like exoplanet first surfaced on August 12 in the German weekly Der Spiegel. Citing an anonymous source with the La Silla Observatory research team, the magazine claimed the rumored planet “is believed to be Earth-like and orbits at a distance to Proxima Centauri that could allow it to have liquid water on its surface—an important requirement for the emergence of life.”

Now we know those rumors were true: There is clear evidence for a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, a small red dwarf star located just 4.25 light years away, slightly closer to Earth than the famous binary pair of Alpha Centauri A and B. It’s been dubbed Proxima b, and the ESO team pegs its mass as being roughly 1.3 times that of Earth.

Read more HERE.

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BOOK REVIEW: Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang

Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Dr. Louise Banks is enlisted by the military to communicate with a race of radially symmetrical aliens who initiated first contact with humanity. Woven through the story are remembrances of her daughter.

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Upon realizing that the upcoming movie Arrival is an adaptation of this story, I thought that I'd have a peek. This is a good hard sci-fi story, albeit a rather mind-bending one (for me anyway) that follows linguist Dr. Louise Banks who has been brought in by the military to attempt communication with a race of seven-limbed symmetrical aliens who have arrived on Earth at various points around the globe. What follows is certainly an interesting tale as Banks and others endeavor to learn about the aliens and their intentions. She eventually becomes quite familiar with their language forms, one of which is totally non-verbal and communicated via complex 'symbols', and from this she ends up receiving understanding of a whole new level of communication which is described by the numerous 'flashbacks' (or 'flashforwards') throughout the story. It took me some time to cotton onto what was happening and the fullness of what she was really learning from the aliens, and the whole thing makes much more sense once I did. Not a particularly exciting or tense story (as depicted in the Arrival movie trailer) but interesting nonetheless, and quite typical of Chiang's rather intellectual style. Not really my flavour but very, very well written and the author shows here what a class act he really is.

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BOOK REVIEW: Starship Coda (Starship Seasons #5) by Eric Brown

Starship Coda (Starship Seasons #5) by Eric Brown
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Ten years after events depicted in Starship Spring, David Conway is enjoying life on the idyllic world of Chalcedony, Delta Pavonis V. Then he receives a communique from his ex-wife who reveals that she is undergoing a remarkable medical process. Not only that, but she is coming to Chalcedony and wishes to meet him. What follows will force Conway to look back at the tragic events of his past and face the mendacity of those seeking to gain from his fame as an Opener of the Way. Starship Coda is the moving epilogue to the successful Starship series.

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This short story is exactly as the name suggests, a concluding event, a summation of the Starship Seasons series of novellas. While probably not vital or essential to the series, it nonetheless provides fitting closure to the main background story of the main character David Conway. If you've read the Starship Seasons stories then you'll love this and it'll provide you with an additional measure of satisfaction for what is an excellent series. I have to say it, Eric Brown fails to disappoint me again.

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BOOK REVIEW: Starship Spring (Starship Seasons #4) by Eric Brown

Starship Spring (Starship Seasons #4) by Eric Brown
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“That year, a little over six years since meeting Hannah van Harben, life for me was just about as good as it could get.”
David Conway is happily married with a young daughter, and wants for nothing. He has an idyllic life on the colony world of Chalcedony, with friends Matt and Maddie, Hawk and Kee – but things are about to get interesting when the friends holiday at Tamara Falls on the planet’s equatorial plateau. Buried far beneath the Falls is a dormant alien army – the Skeath, ancient enemies of the Yall: an army which is threatening to come to life, if the evil Dr Petronious gets his way… Starship Spring is the triumphant conclusion to the Starship Quartet.

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This is the fourth adventure in the excellent Starship Seasons series of novellas from one of my all-time favorite authors. This one is another typical example of Eric Brown's work, and epitomizes what is (to me) some of the most fun and relaxing sci-fi to read. Like the other stories in the series, as well as much of his other work, this novella is written in Brown's great easy and sort of pulp style that I love so much, and this lends itself to the delivery of a fun read that I find myself quickly absorbed into.

In Starship Spring, we again join David Conway and his likeable band of friends on the planet Chalcedony for another adventurous journey of intrigue and discovery. The story skips briskly along as you'd expect from the previous stories and has a fine conclusion, with plenty of alien wonder and intrigue. Character depth is fine for the type of stories that these are, and the world building is excellent once again.

Each of the novellas could be read as a standalone story without any real problem, but the events do follow a timeline and loose thread that would be best picked up from Starship Summer which is the first story of the series. This has been a fabulous little series of stories and takes Brown yet another step up the ladder in my author rankings. I see that recently there has been a coda for the series released and I have just purchased said story that will no doubt top off one of the best group of easy sci-fi stories that I've read to date.

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BOOK REVIEW: Saturn Run by John Sandford

Saturn Run by John Sandford
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The year is 2066. A Caltech intern inadvertently notices an anomaly from a space telescope—something is approaching Saturn, and decelerating. Space objects don’t decelerate. Spaceships do.

A flurry of top-level government meetings produces the inescapable conclusion: Whatever built that ship is at least one hundred years ahead in hard and soft technology, and whoever can get their hands on it exclusively and bring it back will have an advantage so large, no other nation can compete. A conclusion the Chinese definitely agree with when they find out.

The race is on, and an remarkable adventure begins—an epic tale of courage, treachery, resourcefulness, secrets, surprises, and astonishing human and technological discovery, as the members of a hastily thrown-together crew find their strength and wits tested against adversaries both of this earth and beyond. What happens is nothing like you expect—and everything you could want from one of the world’s greatest masters of suspense.

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A great book, no doubt about it, and probably one of the more "solid" novels that I've read in years. By that, I mean that it kept my attention firmly from beginning to end and left me feeling satisfied. It's a combination of techno-thriller and hard sci-fi and, while I know that could sound rather heavy, it actually works well and flows superbly. I reckon that if Larry Niven and Tom Clancy were to have collaborated on a book it would've come out something like this. The sci-fi elements (which are almost space-opera in flavor) were nothing outstanding but solid nonetheless, and from this I get the feeling that this book is aimed more at a general audience rather than the dedicated sci-fi crowd. In general, there's not a whole lot to criticize, the subject matter and plot are great, it's written very well and the story moves about from scene to scene seamlessly. The characters are excellent as is the dialogue, and there's no shortage of all of the good stuff including a fair dose humor along the way as well, which was actually one of my favorite aspects of the book. The only reason that I didn't give it the fifth star was that I was expecting a big and surprising twist which never eventuated. As I said, I still felt satisfied with the end, but it felt like it was building up to something bigger. That should not put anyone who enjoys a good thriller from reading it, and I reckon it's not likely to disappoint.

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BOOK REVIEW: Helix Wars (Helix #2) by Eric Brown

Helix Wars by Eric Brown
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Helix Wars, sequel to the best-selling Helix is a fast-paced adventure novel about the ultimate threat to the Helix itself and to humanity, whose role it is to protect it.

The Helix: a vast spiral of ten thousand worlds turning around its sun. Aeons ago, the enigmatic Builders constructed the Helix as a refuge for alien races on the verge of extinction.

Two hundred years ago, humankind came to the Helix aboard a great colony ship, and the Builders conferred on them the mantle of peacekeepers. For that long, peace has reigned on the Helix. But when shuttle pilot Jeff Ellis crash-lands on the world of Phandra, he interrupts a barbarous invasion from the neighbouring Sporelli - who scheme to track down and exterminate Ellis before he can return to New Earth and inform the peacekeepers.

Helix Wars, sequel to the best-selling Helix, is a fast-paced adventure novel about the ultimate threat to the Helix itself.

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Following on from the earlier book Helix, where a human starship crashes onto a huge and spectacular helix shaped construct containing thousands of worlds, Helix Wars continues the story a couple of hundred years later. It's a good yarn, no doubt about it, but this was definitely my least enjoyed Eric Brown story to date. The reason for this is not so much with the delivery, which is typically good, but I was surprised to find myself rushing a little and trying to avoid text skipping during a large portion of the book. This is the first time I've experienced this while reading Brown's work. I think I know why, many of the action sequences were just a tad painful, and certainly felt like the author was positioning them in the story for the sake of having action, not so much because they'd add to the story, which I guess in general they did, it's just that it was a bit too much. I don't remember Helix being like this. With all that said, the tale itself is good, and contains the usual Eric Brown epic scale and wonder, huge alien artifacts, species and cultures, lots of good sci-fi stuff. It's certainly advisable to read Helix first, as this introduces much of the background information and characters that have roles in this book. The conclusion is okay with enough room left for further expansion, etc. and I sense that there could be further Helix stories in the future. Mostly recommended, mainly if you enjoyed Helix, but it's not a book that I would steer a first time Eric Brown reader toward.

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The Chinese Government is Setting Up Its Own Major Science Fiction Award

by Andrew Liptak

This is pretty interesting: during the latest national congress of the China Association for Science and Technology, chairman Han Qide announced that the country would be setting up a program to promote science fiction and fantasy, including the creation of a new major award.

Throughout much of its genre’s history, China’s science fiction has had a legacy of usefulness, often promoted to educate readers in concepts relating to science and technology. This new award will be accompanied by an “international sci-fi festival” and other initiatives to promote the creation of new stories.

In the last couple of decades, China has enjoyed an unprecedented boom when it comes to science fiction. Since the 1990s, dozens of authors have broken out and written a number of high profile books, creating a viable community. Every year, Chinese science fiction magazine Science Fiction World issues its own major award, the Galaxy.

The Three Body trilogy by Liu Cixin

This is particularly exciting news, given the increases that we’ve seen in science fiction coming from China. Authors such as Liu Cixin, Chen Quifan, Xia Jia, and others have had their works translated into English frequently, while Liu Cixin’s novel The Three Body Problem earned the Hugo Award for Best Novel last year.

With more works coming to English readers this year, such as Death’s End - the concluding volume of the Three Body trilogy - and Ken Liu’s anthology of translated stories Invisible Planets, greater support for science fiction will hopefully translate into a wealth of new stories.

Given the quality of the stories that have been written already, this could be the start of a promising new wave of exciting new fiction for readers across the world.

BOOK REVIEW: Flames Over Norway by Robert Jackson

Flames Over Norway by Robert Jackson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Pilot Officer Ken Armstrong is one of a small and select band of Spitfire pilots. 

In the winter of early 1940, freezing in their cramped cockpits, the pilots set out to photograph German targets that will be attacked when the ‘Phoney War’ gives way to a shooting war — the heavy industries of the Ruhr Valley and, above all, warships of the German Navy, standing ready to break out into the Atlantic and prey on Britain’s vital convoys. 

Suddenly, in the early days of April 1940, an armada of German warships begins to move from the north German ports. Armstrong and his fellow pilots have the task of shadowing them, and soon establish that the invasion of Norway is beginning. 

Shot down during a photo-recce sortie over Norway, Armstrong finds himself fighting with Allied ground forces before reaching an RAF fighter squadron operating from a frozen lake in the far north. 

He is soon involved in an amazing intrigue with Norwegian government officials, desperate to salvage Norway’s remaining gold reserves and fly them to England. 

Finding an aircraft capable of doing the job is a problem — which Armstrong and his new friends set about solving. The obvious answer is to steal one from under the noses of the conquering Germans…

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This is the second book by this author that I've read, and my experience was similar. Flames Over Norway is set during the very early stages of World War Two, and the central character is a young reconnaissance pilot who flies dangerous photographing missions over enemy territory in an unarmed aircraft. The story moves along quite well and describes the scene very well, almost documentary style in places with the author filling in the background tactical situation of the posturing armies and air forces. As the title suggests, the largest section of the story takes place in Norway, where the German forces are trying to gain a foothold due to the valuable strategic nature of their shipping ports, essential for their naval vessels trying to get to the North Atlantic. The story turns more into a blow-by-blow account of tussles between the local militias, British garrisons and the invading Nazi troops, and is well-written and interesting, but the story still lacks a definable overriding plot or story. There are some particularly cool naval battle scenes that I found interesting and there is a small amount of intrigue around a train load of gold that the Norwegians are desperately trying to whisk away from under the Germans' noses, but not a heavy enough plot to really engage. Had there been a bigger story at work (other than the whole World War Two thing) then this book would've been a lot harder to put down. The author's knowledge of the period and of the aircraft and hardware appears to be vast and accurate, and this lends itself to a book that is more educational than entertaining. I reckon that anyone who is an enthusiast of World War Two aviation in particular would enjoy the book, but I wouldn't recommend it to a typical reader looking for a rollicking yarn. This is a bit of a shame because the writing style is good and the story flows well enough, it's just missing that "big picture" to keep the reader firmly on the hook.

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