Humankind has expanded out into interstellar space using star gates-technological remnants left behind by an ancient, long-vanished race. But the technology comes with a price. Among the stars, humanity encountered the Fallers, a strange alien race bent on nothing short of genocide. It's all-out war, and humanity is losing.In this fragile situation, a new planet is discovered, inhabited by a pre-industrial race who experience "shared reality"-they're literally compelled to share the same worldview. A team of human scientists is dispatched-but what they don't know is that their mission of first contact is actually a covert military operation.For one of the planet's moons is really a huge mysterious artifact of the same origin as the star gates . . . and it just may be the key to winning the war.
Earth is an environmental disaster area when humanity gains new hope: a star gate is discovered in the solar system, built by a long-gone alien race. Earth establishes extrasolar colonies and discovers alien races--including the warlike Fallers, the only spacefaring race besides humans. Mysterious, uncommunicative, and relentlessly bent on humanity's extinction, the Fallers have mastered the star gates, and are closing in on earth.
Dr. Bazargan commands the scientific team sent to a newly discovered world to study its humanoid natives: beings who literally perceive only one reality. To lie is to be unreal--and condemned to death. The humans must flee for their lives across the unknown planet when they and the aliens learn the scientific mission is a lie. It's the cover for a secret military exploration of the moon Tas, which is another artifact of the gate-makers: a superweapon capable of annihilating all life in a star system, and already known to the Fallers.
Nancy Kress has won the Hugo, the Sturgeon, and three Nebula Awards. She is justly acclaimed as a literary SF writer, but receives little acknowledgement that her work is hard SF. Probability Moon should change this, winning her many new readers while pleasing her fans. It's a rare and desirable hybrid: a literary, military, hard-SF novel. Set in the same world as her Nebula- and Sturgeon-winning novelette, "Flowers of Aulit Prison," Probability Moon is the first book of a trilogy, but it has a self-contained story line. The sequel, Probability Sun, will appear in 2001, and the concluding book will be The Fabric of Space. --Cynthia Ward
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 3.5 / 5.0
Not Free SF Reader:
Humans have discovered ancient alien technology, and have also discovered current real live aliens that really don't like them at all. In the middle of a war that isn't going too well an expedition discovers some possible useful technology. However, the planet it is on has a strange society, their belief in their consensual reality is what drives them, and outsiders are ostracised and more.
An Almost Great Book:
What I like best about Nancy Kress, as an author, is that she knows how to write a science fiction novel that has both good science and good fiction in it. Too often, writers are only good at one side of the equation or the other. I thought this was a great book, except for one key element. The crisis scene in the middle of the book doesn't make sense and, since it is pivotal to the story as a whole, the second half of the book really suffers for it. What do I mean by "crisis scene"? I mean the... more info
Great character development -- weak ending:
Nancy Kress' "Probability Moon" takes a little getting used to at the very beginning. Humans are traversing the stars through space tunnels they discovered, and they're finding humans scattered throughout the universe, apparently seeded by some unknown alien for an unknown purpose. They also found the Fallers, an alien race that wipes out human colonies anywhere they're found. All of this information is a little overwhelming at first and actually only background to the story at the heart of this book.more info
A little confusing, but very entertaining:
Humanity has lucked out and discovered a series of space "tunnels" left by an earlier, more advanced civilization, allowing us to jump right into interstellar travel and exploration without going through all the tedious process of solving our problems here on Earth first. The result is a space program that is highly advanced, far reaching, and not all that concerned with ethics. Unfortunately, despite our shortcomings, we are still the second-most advanced civilization in the known galaxy, and we're at... more info
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