Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel Author: Michael D. O'Brien | Language: English | ISBN:
B00H4FGGFW | Format: PDF
Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel Description
Set eighty years in the future, this novel by the best-selling author Michael O'Brien is about an expedition sent from the planet Earth to Alpha Centauri, the star closest to our solar system. The Kosmos, a great ship that the central character Neil de Hoyos describes as a "flying city", is immense in size and capable of more than half light-speed. Hoyos is a Nobel Prize winning physicist who has played a major role in designing the ship.
Hoyos has signed on as a passenger because he desires to escape the seemingly benign totalitarian government that controls everything on his home planet. He is a skeptical and quirky misanthropic humanist with old tragedies, loves, and hatreds that are secreted in his memory. The surprises that await him on the voyage-and its destination-will shatter all of his assumptions and point him to a true new horizon.
Science fiction and fantasy literature are genres that have become dominant forces in contemporary worldwide culture. Our fascination with the near-angelic powers of new technology, its benefits and dangers, its potential for obsession and catastrophe, raises vital questions that this work explores about human nature and the cosmos, about man's image of himself and where he is going-and why he seeks to go there.
- File Size: 934 KB
- Print Length: 598 pages
- Publisher: Ignatius Press (December 5, 2013)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00H4FGGFW
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #49,457 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
In Michael O’Brien’s new book Voyage to Alpha Centauri he enters the genre of Science Fiction. This book is both in some ways totally different from his previous books and very similar. All the themes he explores are present in this story. Elements present in his “Children of the Last Day” series are especially present such as an intrusive government and the loss of religious freedom. The collision of these factors providing tension along with personal conversion. Yet some of this is handled more tangentially than his previous books.
Neil Ruiz de Hoyos as a young man meets with an accident that both marks him and opens up a new vista for him. His later career as a physicist bring him two Nobel prizes. His work leads partially to the construction of a ship that goes on an expedition to Alpha Centauri where he is a passenger. We see the voyage through his journal entries where he writes about the voyage, his life and childhood, and the discoveries they encounter on a planet in the system of Alpha Centauri. An epistolary novel works quite well when it comes to covering the large amount of time involved in such a voyage where journal entries can just highlight what is going on in the main.
As a man Neil is both private and reaching out for friendships. A man raised in a Catholic family, but now with no faith which has been supplanted by a scientific skepticism. Yet somebody who is also skeptical regarding a form of government enforced political correctness and just following along with societal trends. Despite what he encounters and learns from his small core of friends there are some things he would rather explain away than to truly understand.
With `Voyage to Alpha Centauri' Michael O'Brien sets out on a new frontier, departing from his traditional genre, perhaps not so different than his (I'd say very successful) endeavor into historical fiction with Theophilos (Theophilos: A Novel). Though a new setting, the author's thoughtful, deeply philosophical gaze into the inner-workings of the human person, and how our fallen natures play out in human society (even eighty years from now, when supposedly we would be that much further along on the "enlightenment scale"), are still richly at work, interwoven within an intricate plot on a futuristic horizon.
I suspect that the majority of the initial readers of `Voyage' will be the faithful Michael O'Brien followers, who consume a novel then anxiously await his next release. To those readers, I will assure you that you will not be disappointed! I border right now on neglect of my wife and four children with my near inability to put the book down. Yet it provides wonderful opportunities for discussion and reflection with my wife once the children are (supposedly) sleeping. Those who loved the `Children of the Last Days' series will find rich symbolism embedded in very subtle references that hearken to previous writings by the author. Most of these allusions will very likely be missed, but it is clear O'Brien is continuing on a long-developed thread; that man is created to be free, and any form of authority--no matter how seemingly compassionate and benign--that is willing to sacrifice this truth for the self-defined "collective good", will ultimately digress into totalitarianism.
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