Stranded is Book 1 of five books in the Starship of the Ancients series.

In the distant future, humanity has spread to many different planets in many different star systems, and it continues to spread out by sending colony ships with thousands of people to new stars and planets. Those journeys are hugely expensive  and are undertaken by massive corporations. Humanity is controlled by an elected government, headed by a chancellor.

When the ship arrives at its destinations, an accident occurs, the ship explodes, with most settlers getting killed. Only a few dozen manage to escape in landing pods. They find themselves on an alien planet, full of dangerous predators.

Evan is a former soldier who was assigned to an undercover investigation of a criminal cartel. When his cover was broken, he was sent away in this ship on short notice in a witness-protection situation. When he lands on the planet, he meets Anya, a xenobiologist who was involved in the planning of the mission. The two now work together to solve the puzzle of what happened to the ship, and to try to create a stronghold where the few dozen survivors can eek out a living on an alien world without any supply line.

They quickly discover that the accident may not have been an accident at all, and somebody tried to kill them all. There seems to be a criminal conspiracy that permeates the government and all of humanity.

Stranded is well written and I found myself turning the pages. It’s obviously a space opera, with a lot of politics. There is a government covering many planets over many star systems, obviously many light years apart. The ships can travel between the stars through gates instantaneously. And somehow they can also communicate over those distances, presumably through relays through the gates, instantaneously. There is no time-dilation. There seem to be no fuel or resource problems for that kind of travel. The story  plays in a world “in the stars” but it’s no different than countries on earth, now that we have instantaneous communication methods. It’s not really science fiction, it’s political fiction.

The characters, even the protagonists, are pretty shallow and superficial. There is a lot of exposition and not much dialog. Often the interactions and emotions are inconsistent. At one point they make a decision they have to go on an overland expedition to find the wreckage of a ship so they can obtain its communications gear, and then later they express that they wish they had never left. This kind of behavior keeps happening and makes the story unrealistic.

Of course, from the subtitle “starship of the ancients” we know that there is some alien technology involved. The main plot is about the race to find an ancient alien starship with technology that all humanity wants. This is kind of trite and has been done many times over, with the Starship in the Stone just being the most recent one I have come across.

The first human colony on Mars consisted of a number of habitats and 54 colonists. An intense, 6-month-long dust storm covered all the solar panels and destroyed much of the facility. After all contact was lost, and satellite imagery showed much of the facility destroyed, it took several years before a new mission could be launched to investigate what might have happened.

Six astronauts eventually landed nearby and started investigating. What they found was not quite what they expected. In particular, apparently there were survivors. Quickly, however, some of the crew members started getting ill, experienced psychotic episodes and started turning against each other.

Colony One Mars is the first book of a series of six books. I knew that when I picked it up. After reading, I now realize that it’s not really a book, but the first chapter of a long book of six chapters. There is no real resolution, no end, many questions remain unanswered, and yes, you want to pick up the next book. And I guess that is the point.

However, it is just not good enough a story that I want to spend more time on it. This book reminded me of The Object by Joshua T. Calvert, which I reviewed about a year ago, where I said this verbatim:

Without spoiling the book for you, I just have to add that it’s always baffling when there is a space mission where Earth selects its best and brightest to go to meet an alien vessel, and those brilliant super astronauts do really, really stupid things once they are out there on their own. Perhaps that makes for an exciting plot, but for me it’s just distracting. These people are idiots out there, and when I read the story, it does not draw me in. It loses me and I want it to just move on and be done.

The only difference is that the mission does not visit an alien vessel, it visits a derelict colony on Mars, but the mission participants are for the most part cardboard characters with no real personalities. There is a female Ph.D. biologist who is the protagonist. The mission commander and the first officer are both one-dimensional humans who seem to be built just for the simple plot of this book. The author really does not bother to build characters for the entire crew. They are just there to move things along.

There is a commercial faction on Earth who pulls the financial strings of the mission, called COM, which stands for “Colony One Mars.” There are board members who are pure evil, motivated only by money, who are the actual culprits and who use people as expendable pawns in their game of riches.

Interestingly, there is a character named Leon Maximus, who is introduced here:

Leon Maximus, on the other hand, Peter admired. He was motivated by a seemingly sincere desire to advance human civilization. To make it an interplanetary species. To establish a Planet B, as he liked to call it. He was a rare breed indeed. None of this would have been possible if it were not for him and his genius. His company had developed the rocket technology to get the first colonists to Mars. Still, it was a slow tedious process. It was an eight month trip and, with the way the planets orbited each other, a tight two year launch window.

Kilby, Gerald M.. Colony One Mars: Fast Paced Scifi Thriller (Colony Mars Series Book 1) (pp. 80-81). Outer Planet Media. Kindle Edition.

You can move the letters of Leon around and match them to a real person in our time who is obsessed with colonizing Mars.

There are a lot of raving reviews out there about this hard science fiction book and it being a page-turner. Well, I turned the pages all the way through, but it’s really a story that is very contrived and just not all that interesting. If you want a real Mars story, you need to read The Martian, by Andy Weir.

Colony One Mars is the first book of a series, but I won’t read the other five.

 

Isaac Asimov published the Foundation Trilogy in the early 1950ies.

• Book 1: Foundation (1951)
• Book 2: Foundation and Empire (1952)
• Book 3: Second Foundation (1953)

I first read the three books some 40 years ago in my twenties, but I only had vague memories. I remember them being good and, at the time, iconic. When a friend recently made a reference to them I decided to read them again. Usually I review books individually, but after reading the full trilogy, I came to the conclusion that they need to be combined. The books don’t stand on their own. The trilogy is really just one very long book.

Asimov added several more books to the series, two prequels and two sequels:

• Book 4: Foundation’s Edge (1982) – sequel
• Book 5: Foundation and Earth (1986) – sequel
• Book 6: Prelude to Foundation (1988) – prequel
• Book 7: Forward the Foundation (1993) – prequel

Book 7  was published after Asimov’s death in 1992.

I have not read any of the other four.

The trilogy plays about 10,000 years in the future. Humanity has invented interstellar travel by using ships that can make hyperspace jumps to travel the vast distances between stars.

The population of the galaxy at that  time is estimated to be quintillions of people, living on about 20 million planets which they call “worlds.” The capital of the Galactic Empire is the planet Trantor, which is completely covered by a gigantic city and has a population of approximately 40 billion people. The Empire is at a breaking point. The mathematician Hari Seldon invents the science of psychohistory, which allows him to predict the future. He creates a foundation of scientists with the objective to rebuild a new empire out of the chaos and lawlessness of millennia of anarchy.

Asimov builds a world, a universe, a psychology and a political system in the Foundation Trilogy. What strikes me reading it now in 2025 is that it is really not a science fiction story, but a story of politics. The Galactic Empire could be the Roman Empire, or even the United States of today. In the Foundation Trilogy, people live on planets, but they could just as well live in city states of the Roman Empire. The people travel on spaceships, but the technology is mysterious and not really described. Asimov refers to “nuclear” energy as the solution to all energy problems. The spaceships just seem to be able to travel vast distances without needing to take on fuel – because they have “nuclear” engines. The Foundation is the preeminent power in the Galaxy because it’s the only political entity that still knows to to control nuclear energy. There is no time dilation since the ships seem to just make jumps but never really accelerate in normal space. He does not bother to explain any of this technology. It is simply the basis of the story, which is mostly told via dialog between key characters. There are also no computers, and there is no Internet. Messages are sent via vacuum tubes, like those we still see in bank drive-ins. The Foundation Trilogy is a political novel, not a science fiction story. Another thing that I found odd is that there are absolutely no aliens in this universe. You’d think that Asimov would have assumed that there are alien civilizations amongst the 20 million inhabited worlds, but there is not a single alien in the entire story.

Essentially, Asimov wrote the Foundation Trilogy as a political saga in “space” based on the knowledge he had in the 1940ies.

I am pretty sure that if I had rated the trilogy when I first read it 40 years ago in the 1980ies, I would have given it three stars. But today, I found it fairly uninteresting, not particularly suspenseful, with hokey science and an inadequate depiction of a space-traveling society. That maxes out at 1.5 stars.

 

Melody Adams works for NASA as a physicist and astronomer. One night, in Hawaii, she discovers an odd object near Pluto with attributes that don’t make any sense. She and her associate quickly come to the conclusion that the object must be coming from outside the solar system. Furthermore, it does not behave like a natural object. When she goes public with her discovery, she quickly loses credibility with the scientific community and NASA, and gets fired.

Fast forward a few years, when the object is observed again near Saturn, slowing down. All doubts are erased. Melody quickly gets back in good graces with NASA, and she eventually gets the commander post as an astronaut on a mission to rendezvous with the object. Once on the journey, things quickly go wrong, and a rift develops between the crew on the ship and Earth and its petty politics.

The book, even on its cover, is portrayed as hard science fiction. It plays in the near future, and the characters all use today’s technology. But I don’t think this is hard science fiction, like Andy Weir’s The Martian. Actually, I found it kind of hokey. Melody Adams, the protagonist, is one of those female astronaut superheroes. She is smarter than everyone else, she has a Ph.D. in physics, she is at the top of her astronaut class, and – as you would not suspect – she sleeps with Jim, the NASA administrator. That whole side plot of being in love with Jim makes no sense, does not contribute to the plot, and I could not quite figure out why it was there.

Without spoiling the book for you, I just have to add that it’s always baffling when there is a space mission where Earth selects its best and brightest to go to meet an alien vessel, and those brilliant super astronauts do really, really stupid things once they are out there on their own. Perhaps that makes for an exciting plot, but for me it’s just distracting. These people are idiots out there, and when I read the story, it does not draw me in. It loses me and I want it to just move on and be done.

Michael Freeman is an ex-special forces soldier who was injured in the war and is now a disabled veteran. He loses his job and his girlfriend, and he wants to get away to “find himself.”

He was raised by his grandfather in a self-sufficient cabin in the woods. His grandfather has long passed, and Michael goes back to the cabin to get away from it all – with a few six-packs of beer.

When he hikes in the woods behind his cabin, he suddenly falls into a sinkhole or hidden cave, gets hurt badly and passes out. Nobody knows where he is.

When he wakes up he finds himself in a very different world. It turns out he fell onto a hidden spaceship in the rocks below the woods, which has been there for thousands of years, governed by an artificial intelligence, and powered by nano-technology.

Within a few days, Michael, the jaded disabled veteran, turns into a superhero with true superpowers and a mission to change the world with access to all this alien technology.

Of course, soon bad guys show up from all sides making things challenging. Michael assembles a team of ex-soldiers and the battle starts.

The Spaceship in the Stone is a cartoonish fantasy story, of course with a sequel. The characters are wooden, the dialog stilted, the plot contrived and the entire story just over the top.

I finished reading it, though, mildly enjoyed it, but quickly forgot most of the details within the next few days. I was not interested enough to bother picking up Book 2 of “The Space Legacy.”