Rating: 
Summary: it was great.
Review: I have read this book and it was great. The stories were beautiful. I have read read many books like this and Encounter With Tiber is one of the best. I like the amount of adventure in this novel and the author's knowledge of current technology as applied to this novel. I recommend this book to anyone who likes science fiction
Rating: 
Summary: Good in parts, but slow sometimes
Review: I really liked Tiber. I like the concept of going back and forth in time and enjoyed seeing the view points of the different Tiberian races and the earthlings - maybe the BC earthlings should have had a bit more character. After all they were able to trick a species about 8000 years ahead of them, they should have had some more depth to them. I enjoyed the technical explanations to a point - I am a long time fan of Arthur C. Clarkes books and there is quite a bit of SF technical descriptions there - but at times it got to much from Aldrins descriptions of how things exactly might work. Even I had to scan over some paragraphs to not get too bored. Maybe the middle section with all the Tiberian views were a little too long and could had been interrupted a couple of times - also the end was very anti climactic - but it was fun anyway.
Rating: 
Summary: Brilliant combination of adventure and hard SF
Review: I was very pleasantly surprised by this book. The combination of Aldrin's technical knowledge and Barnes' ability to tell a good story make this one of the best books I've read. The Tiberian's story is tragic, yet at the same time uplifting, as well as a not so subtle warning about the dangers of not planning for the future. The level of technical detail is high (not unlike Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy) and may put some people off, but to a true hard SF fan it's what makes the book that much more convincing. The characterisations (especially of the Tiberians) are excellent. This is a brilliant collaboration which all hard SF fans will want to read
Rating: 
Summary: What a waste of perfectly good trees.
Review: I've read a lot of science fiction books over the years, and I can honestly say that this is one of the worst I've ever forced myself to finish. How anyone could read this book and give it a rating above a 2 or a 3 is beyond me. The aliens are upright walking cats and dogs from only 4 light years away who seem to share a lot of the catch phrases and sayings of the current American culture. It was hard to find a coherent sentence on any of the numerous pages. Somewhere an English teacher weeps. Also, the story (if you can call it that) violates Einstein's Theory of Relativity as it applies to major time perception differences between conscious entities aboard objects moving at relativistic speeds and those who aren't moving as fast (fewer years would pass aboard a spaceship moving at 99% of the speed of light than would pass on the crew's home planet). Note to self: "Choose your reading materials more carefully".
Rating:
Summary: Contains truly amazing prophecies! (see below)
Review: In chapter 3 of this book (published 1996) a foundation meeting of a proposed space tourism company 'Share Space Global' takes place on Friday 16th July 1999. Those attending are influential and wealthy opinion leaders including Messrs Gates, Eisner, Forbes, Branson & JFK Jr. If you cross reference the dates our authors have from more than three years in the past picked the exact date of JFK's demise! On reflection he probably would have preferred to attend this foundation meeting!
Rating:
Summary: This is a great book!
Review: In reading the other reviews, this seems to be a "loved it" or "hated it" kind of book, with nothing in between. I definitely fall into the former category. This is one of the best books I've read in quite a while.
It is in reality four books in one, in that one of the main characters appearing at the beginning of the book is an author writing the other three, and we get to read her work.
The reviews listed above seem to imply that the family of one of the characters who dies is personally responsible for carrying on the work he was involved in. This is incorrect. The man's descendents are involved in the work, but only as part of the combined forces of all the space agencies around the world. Each person is involved by their own individual choice, not because it's "what the family does". As one of the descendents says, he would've been an astronaut even if his father (the character who dies) had been a plumber.
I was sorry to see the book end. It does, however, leave an opening for a continuation. Let's hope that Aldrin and Barnes keep them coming!
Rating:
Summary: Engrossing science fiction reading
Review: My strongest recommendation to the reader is that this book is reminiscent of A.C. Clarke. Informative and will set your imagination racing about the near future and distant past. The sense of plausibility makes this book fascinating.
Rating:
Summary: Barely literate.
Review: One of the first things any (halfway decent) writer of fiction will tell you is that the most fundamental rule is "Don't tell me, show me." Aldrin and Barnes spend an inordinate amount of time in detailed explanations of technology, history, and motivation, and precious little showing their characters in action. "Encounter..." reads more like a premise for a book than real fiction, and the prose is among the worst I have ever seen published. It is difficult to believe that John Barnes, the man responsible for the wildly imaginative (if occasionally banal) "Mother of Storms," among other competently-written novels, had anything to do with this; I would be embarassed to have my name associated with it in any way. Forget the plot; the "first encounter" scenario has been done so many times, in so many ways, and so often better than it is done here that there is no point to reading this. No point at all.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting tale
Review: People tend to love or hate this book I noticed, but personally I found it akin to Barnes's other novels which I have enjoyed, but simultaneously get annoyed by. Buzz's authorial voice is hard to pull apart from Barnes except where there's a lot of technical concepts flying around - definitely Buzz's material there. A curious omission that many have missed is its silence about the violation of conservation of momentum that the deccelerator loop on the Earth Starship causes - at no point do the authors note the large accelerations such a thing would cause. Also its flight-time seems to be based on non-relativistic calculations - these aren't major errors, but odd considering Buzz's meticulous details on other technical matters.
Rating:
Summary: One glaring error is the only flaw.
Review: Right near the beginning there is a computer
mathematics error that would make the rest of
the book impossible. Hexadecimal numbers count
from ZERO through NINE then the letters A
through F, not ONE through NINE and the letters
A through E as stated in the book. When nine
plus five equals 16 is when the politicians
will get with it and start getting serious about
the space program. Still, since I knew the right
numbers for hexadecimal, and it was only mentioned
once, only one point off.
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