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Piper H. Beam
Customer Reviews
Avg. Customer Review:
A must-read
, June 8, 2001
Reviewer
:
When a wandering red dwarf star enters an established solar system, it splits a giant
planet in half and creates two sister planets upon both of which intelligent life evolves.
One planet gets most of the water, and its humanoids evolve to be religious, hierarchical,
socialistic, and sneaky. The other world is dry, and its humanoids evolve to be atheistic
(to the point of having no concept of gods), individualistic, capitalistic, and honest. Once
contact is established, can two such different species get along, and if not, then what will
be the cost?
Mr. H. Beam Piper is probably one of the most underrated science-fiction authors. He
was a master of presenting unique milieus in a fascinating and understandable manner.
First Cycle, succeeds in being both thought provoking and spellbinding, and is (in my
opinion) one of Piper's best stories ever. As always, the worlds herein are unusual and
presented in a scientific manner that makes them seem so very real. This is one book you
really must read!
A Cold War warning transposed into Science Fiction.
, July 9, 1998
Reviewer
:
A good answer to the question of who wins an atomic war. Finished after Piper's death
from a manuscript. Written just after Uller Uprising, and probably abandoned as other
projects came up. Still, a good philosophical tale in the standard Piper manner: you never
realize that you're being preached to.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter One
For endless millenia the red dwarf, pulled from its home orbit by some random stellar
happenstance, crossed the lonely void between the two galaxies of the near universe.
Curving and twisting through the competing attraction—weak but inevitable—of the
gravity wells of distant nebulae, it gradually swung around to head toward a particular
medium-sized star cluster. Penetrating the cluster, it bore straight toward the eight-planet
system of a yellow-white star thirty-eight light years from the cluster's gravitic center.
The eighth planet, and the seventh, and the sixth, were on the far sides of their orbits
as the red dwarf approached; but the fifth, a methane giant with three major satellites,
was in harm's way. As they closed together, the planet heated; its coating of frigid gasses
flowed, and then vaporized. Great tidal forces tore at the planet's dense, solid core.
Quakes and explosions shook the surface; the atmosphere burned.
For an instant, during which the great planet seemed to hesitate in its orbit, the seismic
insult increased past endurance. Two of the three major moons were ripped away; they
spiraled inward to the yellow star and disappeared as though they had never been. The
third satellite, torn almost equally between its mother planet and the passing dwarf,
slowed in its orbit, and then, as the red star passed, came crashing down on its primary.
This final shock broke the giant planet into two almost equal halves, and a minor planet's
worth of solar debris.
The red dwarf, dragging the broken halves after it, dived toward the yellow star. The
fourth planet escaped with no more than superficial damage, the third passed unscathed.
But the second was directly in the path of the destroyer. It swung from its orbit, spun
madly for an instant, and then hurtled into the red star like a racing scull ramming a
battleship.
Relatively, the planet's mass and impact were trivial; the sacrificial collision, however,
prevented a greater catastrophe at the center of the system. The invader caromed slightly
off course, lost momentum, and was trapped. The attraction of the yellow sun, the lesser
attractions of the planet family, and the red dwarfs own new velocity combined to pin it
to an orbit slightly greater than that of the planet it had just annihilated. Spinning around
one another like a pair of bar-shot on an ever-shortening bar, the two fragments of the
fifth planet followed it.
In time, as time is measured in the cosmos, the system stabilized. The frozen outer
planets wheeled around their ancient orbits. The shattered fifth had left a wide gap. There
was a thin belt of meteoric debris inside the orbit of the third. And, just beyond the orbit
of the vanished second, the new comer and her own new satellite chain traced and re-
traced the orbits imposed on them; yellow star, red dwarf, and attendant fragments
forming a three-body system at the apexes of a one-hundred and fifty million kilometer
equilateral triangle.
The two planet fragments slowly accommodated themselves to one another and to the
rest of their violently re-formed solar system. They crumbled, pulled together,
compressed into spheres. Stripped of all atmosphere in the cataclysm which had sundered
them, they formed now gaseous envelopes, lost them as the heated gas molecules
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