I hadda do it. After Code of the Lifemaker I just had to reread these novels. First time I read this trilogy they were in separate volumes. This time, they're all in one. The total page count is just shy of 700 and the cost was $5.99. Less than a penny a page. Thank you, Del Rey Books!
The titles in the trilogy are Inherit the Stars , The Gentle Giants of Ganymede , and Giants' Star .
The central characters are Vic Hunt, physicist extraordinaire, and Christian Danchekker, biologist and dogmatic evolutionist. This brilliant pair lead us through intrigues in all three stories. The stories are connected, and if you read them in separate books, you should read them in the order I've given them above. It's not necessary, but it'll be clearer.
In Inherit the Stars humans discover the body of a man on the moon. Only mildly strange. Except he's 50,000 years old and he's wearing a space suit. Vic and Chris are sent to investigate and they discover that this guy is genetically human - perfectly like us. So where did he come from? If there were a civilization on Earth that long ago, there ought to be some fragment, however minute, remaining as evidence. But nothing. But if the guy didn't come from earth, where did he come from? The statistics of genetic evolution make it impossible that he could have come from somewhere other than earth and still be so genetically similar to us earth humans. And this is the dilemma that Vic and Hunt resolve.
Gentle Giants is about the discovery of the remnants another species of intelligent creatures on Ganymede, one of Jupiter's moons. The histories of this race and that of the Lunarians is tied together somehow and Vic and Hunt have to unravel that knot. So they travel to Ganymede for research and who should show up but the Ganymeans, thought to have vanished!
The last book is a story of how the Ganymeans and Humans come together to ward off a menace to their mutual destinies. Humans claim their destiny among the stars.
These are excellent feel-good-about-your-species-and-its-destiny stories. Humans are great. Humanity has survived against all odds. Our failings are not our own fault. The devil made us do it. This, of course, is rubbish, but, hey, it's just SF, so anything can happen. And Hogan does a great job of making you feel proud of your ancestors -- those fantastic ancestors in his stories.
He also tends to bring a lot of science into his stories - which I think many SF readers will greatly appreciate. Well, not so much science as philosophy of science. He's pretty clearly familiar with science and with its limitations. He's a 'follower,' of science who is not a fanatic, An understander who proselytizes his understanding to others through these books.
His heros apply Ockham's razor, withhold judgement (well, Vic does anyways), are deeply skeptical of ESP and other miraculous claims, and promulgate the view that truth is of great value in its own right. Gotta luvvit. Too bad these are not likely to be virtues in society at large for a long time to come. This is a major theme in the third book, btw. I remember a quote from (who was it? William James?)....something like...."Most people prefer to believe what they prefer to be true." This applies to a great many people, and not just religious ones either. To lots of different types.
There's this view held among many nonscientists that science is truth and that truth is always good and that falsity is always bad. But that aint the way it works (at least according to guys like Popper anyways). False statments can be very valuable insofar as they can lead us to a broader understanding in our efforts to disprove them. (We strive to disprove all statements, some more successfully than others.) OTOH, some scientists think Popper did a better job of talking about science than in conducting it. Still, he is a major philopher of science this century - perhaps the major philosopher of science. And even if we disagree with him on some things, doesn't mean we should disagree on everything. But the critical thing is that many people who know essentially nothing about subjects find themselves the expert that they want to agree with and then tout that expert as the only expert and everyone who disagrees with their expert as a pseudoscientist -- as if they had any qualifications to judge the issue. Damned curious state of affairs. We have people who have 0 or 1 child giving authoritative pronouncements on the subject of child rearing. We have mentally deficient people speaking authoritatively on the subject of intelligence. We have people who have read half a dozen self-help books and think they're ready to pass down the wisdom of the ages. We have people who know how to use a newsreader with the audacity to give lectures to network engineers on the subject of bandwidth. The world has gone insane. Mad, I tell you! MAD! MAD! MAD!
But back to Hogan and the giants. He's gotta lot of mental action going on in the series...not a lot of physical action. And he's relating his story at the same pace that Heinlein does in Stranger in a Strange Land . The story is in the third person and the narrator is moving things along quickly. He pauses to explain things, but not to describe things. This is not a literary novel (and it doesn't claim to be). It's a techno-novel, and a fair one, I think.
Lots of neat stuff going on: gravitic drives, wormholes, genetic engineering, space travel, direct neural hookups. Oh, and there's a little time travel too... near the end of the last book....kinda reminded me of the time loop in one of Saberhagen's Bezerker books.... Brother Assassin ? Not sure. In any case, it's pretty amusing. The bad guys don't die. But they don't go unpunished, either.
Glad I reread these. I'ld forgotten all about them except for the prologue and epilogue of the first book. Those are quite memorable. Still, the human angle is pretty flat here (happens a lot in SF). But the ideas presented and the way they're presented make them well worth the effort. Read the last novel in four hours last night.
Think I'll trim down on the SF for a while...particularly the rereads like this one. Kinda busy these days. So much to do. So much to read. So much to write. I need some fresh air.
