Rocheworld

Rating:
Summary: For the one who likes Asimov
Review: This is a really good story which in fact has a high probability to really occur. A sailing spacecraft is in fact possible. The star system that is visited seems to be possible, even if it isn't very likely from a celestial point of view that two planets should exist in such a constellation. I will anyway recommend this book!

Rating:
Summary: Forward is my favorite living Hard SF writer
Review: This is my favorite version of the three similar stories, all by Dr Forward. I first read Flight of the DragonFly (4.5 stars). A couple of years later, I read the full version of Rocheworld (Flight + parts of an earlier Rocheworld edition + additional material) and all of its sequels. I liked it even more than Dragon's Egg, my previous Forward Favorite.

Rating:
Summary: Uniqe aliens. sensitive and smart.
Review: This is the only Robert Forward book i've read, but I would like to try some more. The "Fluben" are the most interesting aliens i've read about except maybe the "Moties" from "The mote in god's eye". They are very diffrent anatomically from human beings ,which is logical ,and they are all mathematical geniuses. They're all brain. that is, their whole body ( which is a cloud of a dense fluid hovering in the ocean )is allso the thinking organ. They can become smaller, tighter and harder, form a "rock" and in that state they are even more smart then usual ( and the usual is something like 400 i.q's ). Another thing about this book is that the aliens and the humans don't fight, they get along and like each other. the opponent is nature. Buy the book, it's an interesting read.

Rating:
Summary: Uniqe aliens. sensitive and smart.
Review: This is the only Robert Forward book i've read, but I would like to try some more. The "Fluben" are the most interesting aliens i've read about except maybe the "Moties" from "The mote in god's eye". They are very diffrent anatomically from human beings ,which is logical ,and they are all mathematical geniuses. They're all brain. that is, their whole body ( which is a cloud of a dense fluid hovering in the ocean )is allso the thinking organ. They can become smaller, tighter and harder, form a "rock" and in that state they are even more smart then usual ( and the usual is something like 400 i.q's ). Another thing about this book is that the aliens and the humans don't fight, they get along and like each other. the opponent is nature. Buy the book, it's an interesting read.

Rating:
Summary: Terrible Book -- Immature Writing
Review: To say the least, I'm very upset with the other three reviews here which all gave this book a five star rating. It's just not so. This book is terrible. Essentially, it's like reading a comic book. All the characters are one-sided, extreme caricatures. I got through about page forty (where the main "characters" are picking their crew) before I couldn't take it any more. Every new "character" was a new oddball. I mean, forget about these people being characters in a book. Just think about them as forming a small crew who are going on a one-way mission in a tin can. They'll be en-route for forty years and studying the new system for twenty more. No organization in the universe would pick these people as crew. They wouldn't make it to Mars orbit before they ended up killing each other. Every member of the crew would have been psychologically screened until their brains fell out of their heads. The people who survived that screening and were deemed capable of living in extremely close quarters with a couple of handfuls of other people for the rest of their lives would have trained together for YEARS just to make sure everything was OK. This book is a joke as science fiction. Either that, or it was written for the youth market. Terrible, terrible book. Avoid.

Rating:
Summary: Terrible Book -- Immature Writing
Review: To say the least, I'm very upset with the other three reviews here which all gave this book a five star rating. It's just not so. This book is terrible. Essentially, it's like reading a comic book. All the characters are one-sided, extreme caricatures. I got through about page forty (where the main "characters" are picking their crew) before I couldn't take it any more. Every new "character" was a new oddball. I mean, forget about these people being characters in a book. Just think about them as forming a small crew who are going on a one-way mission in a tin can. They'll be en-route for forty years and studying the new system for twenty more. No organization in the universe would pick these people as crew. They wouldn't make it to Mars orbit before they ended up killing each other. Every member of the crew would have been psychologically screened until their brains fell out of their heads. The people who survived that screening and were deemed capable of living in extremely close quarters with a couple of handfuls of other people for the rest of their lives would have trained together for YEARS just to make sure everything was OK. This book is a joke as science fiction. Either that, or it was written for the youth market. Terrible, terrible book. Avoid.