A decade ago James P. Hogan was among my favorite authors. But then
he wrote a series which took the premise that Velikovsky was right. I
bounced off it hard. I just can't stretch my willing suspension of
disbelief to include Immanuel Velikovsky's bizarre ideas about how the
solar system works, as I know far too much about astronomy, physics,
history, and falsifiablity.
When I saw _Echoes of an Alien Sky_ in a bookstore, I carefully
checked to make sure it wasn't part of that series before buying it.
It's not, but as I discovered after buying it, it too takes that
same premise.
Humans living on Venus -- a world that's hot and damp with lots of
volcanic activity, but is far more earthlike than the Venus of today
-- have developed science and technology, and sent manned missions to
the mysterious third planet to do archaeology on the remains of the
extinct intelligent beings that once lived on Earth. Unsurprisingly,
ruins on Earth's moon are better preserved than ruins on Earth itself,
so it looks like most of the action will concentrate there. (I don't
know for sure, as I couldn't finish the book.)
They take little notice of the fact that the Earth creatures looked
exactly like them, or that they find Earth's climate more pleasant
than Venus's. No doubt by the end of the book they will discover
to their amazement that they're descended from us. It was only my
curiosity as to how Hogan would pull that off, given that Earth humans
become extinct in our near future, and Venus presumably doesn't become
inhabitable until far later, that kept me going almost to page 100.
But I finally just couldn't take it any more. (If anyone who has read
the whole thing wants to summarize for me, please do so. Thanks.)
I could put up with this civilization, obviously more advanced than
ours, having no clue whether the 21st century ruins they found were
thousands, tens of thousands, or millions of years old, even though
they were aware there had been a nuclear war then. (It's been
possible since the 1950s to date nuclear fallout's age to within
a fraction of a percent.) I could even put up with the absurd
descriptions of how they propelled their spacecraft. What I couldn't
put up with is that seldom could more than two or three pages go
by without the action stopping as one of the characters goes on
an inexplicably angry tirade about how incredibly and inexcusably
closed-minded and stupid Earth beings were for believing that the
solar system had been basically unchanged for millions of years, or
that only gravitation rather than electrical fields had a significant
effect on planetary orbits, or for not realizing that Venus had burst
out of Jupiter a few thousand years before the 21st century.
The Venusians have a young-Earth -- I mean young-Venus -- cosmology,
without being religious. If the solar system is massively rearranged
every few thousand years, and Jupiter spits out a planet about that
often, it obviously can't be eons old. Of course that also means that
evolution hasn't had time to happen. Since Hogan isn't a creationist,
he's left without any theory of origins at all. But that's okay,
since having any kind of idea about anything (except one thought up
by Velikovky, I guess) is "ideological" and "closed-minded." So of
course his characters can't draw any conclusions from their being
identical to Earth people. Drawing conclusions is bad.
Since they can't draw conclusions, I don't know why they're doing
science on the Earth and its moon. Maybe they're just collecting
isolated facts for no reason, as Charles Fort did.
Venus in their day has a moon and a short rotation period. I'd be
very curious how Hogan thinks Venus's rotation period could change
that quickly, other than in a tremendous collision which would
of course make the planet even *less* hospitable to life than it
is today.
It was a waste of a wonderful premise. I've always loved stories of
archaeology of vanished advanced technological civilizations, from
Piper's _Omnligual_ to Flint and Spoor's recent _Boundary_. Not to
mention Hogan's own _Inherit the Stars_, which featured the discovery
of *two* vanished technological civilizations.
How the Venusians were able to learn English would make an interesting
story. Unfortunately, it's not the one Hogan decided to tell. As his
story starts, all that's already been worked out. I guess you have to
already know what our ideas were before you can angrily denounce them
as closed-minded.
I don't know whether the Brain Eater got to Hogan, or whether he
simply wasn't Y2K compatible. I do know that I'll never again buy
any books by him.
--
Keith F. Lynch - http://keithlynch.net/
Please see http://keithlynch.net/email.html
before emailing me.
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