Alphanauts.

Douglas Barbour is a professor of English at the University of Alberta.
He is the author of Lyric/anti-lyric : Essays on Contemporary Poetry,
Breath Takes, and Fragmenting Body Etc.

Astronomer J. Brian Clarke writes “hard science fiction” about humankind’s attempts at space exploration and planetary colonization. Alphanauts is his somewhat unwieldy epic about the brave men and women who build a tiny colony on an earthlike world circling Alpha Centauri. As the back cover copy puts it, he “writes about scientists and engineers, about people who think and do, about problems that have to be solved” and the people who solve them.

In Alphanauts, the six explorers who discover Alpha Five find when they return home that they have developed “Earth Allergy Syndrome,” which means they have to go back to Alpha Five. A small group of colonists journey to the world, and a few other ships come after them. Slowly, the little colony grows. But it turns out that there are other intelligent species on the world, remnants of the First and Second Ones, who once battled across the universe, and have perhaps wiped each other out. There are also two ships, with highly intelligent brains, that have been waiting there for millennia. But the humans figure out how to deal with these, and later with a rogue computer on a ship from Earth that has used a faster-than-light drive that shifted it into another universe, with dire results.

Clarke’s intrepid band of colonists encounters a number of interesting and dangerous problems and somehow solves them all. Much more interesting, they slowly build their little settlement and learn how to survive on their new world; meanwhile, they receive little hints of what might go wrong on Earth over the next two centuries. It goes very wrong, and that is the final big problem they have to solve.

All of this makes for a fast trip through a number of mini-narratives, each one a puzzle story, but together almost too much of a good thing, especially as some of the solutions feel a bit too ex machina. His characters are somewhat bland, standard for this sort of fare. Alphanauts offers readers a taste of old-fashioned science fiction — the how-to possibilities of space colonization from a student of the craft.