Teaser

At the end of the twentieth century, humanity takes a renewed interest in spaceflight. At the dawn of the twenty-first, we discover we are not alone. Long ago, aliens visited our world, and now we can claim our inheritance . . .

Review

When I first read this book about a decade and a half ago, I really enjoyed it. Reading it again now, I can honestly say it’s up there with my favourite science fiction books of all time. When it was originally published, it projected the future of spaceflight for the next few decades. Having lived through some of those decades, and seeing how different reality has become from fiction, really gives the book an extra edge.

With any book written by more than one author, you always wonder who wrote what. This is especially true when one of those authors is better known as a celebrity personality than as a writer. It would be easy to write off Aldrin’s contribution to this book as nothing but a gimmick to boost sales, and I dare say the blurbs from other astronauts would not have happened had it been Barnes alone listed on the cover. But I genuinely think the bulk of this story – the parts that matter, I dare say – are Aldrin’s. Certainly there’s a level of technical know-how and intimate knowledge of spaceflight that could only have been created by someone with first-hand experience.

In some ways, the book doesn’t hold up to modern read. Though there are still a few months left of the year, I dare say we won’t make it to Mars in 2025. We’re only just starting to look at getting back to the Moon. As for the book’s suggestion of an economic boom starting in 2012, I’d like to know how exactly I missed out on that one. But accurate prediction is not the point of the book. Of course we won’t be colonising orbital space in the next decade. Nor are we likely to encounter prehistoric alien archives. these are just the tools Aldrin and Barnes use to craft a story that is exciting, and wonderful, and above all else, inspiring. This is a book about humanity’s potential for spaceflight. A book that takes a good hard look at us as a species and says we can do this.

It’s not a rose tinted vision either. There are tragedies along the way. Astronauts die in accidents. Ships explode and crash. Not everyone gets along. But beneath it all is a sense of optimism. Aldrin and Barnes foresaw that the innovation would no longer come from national entities alone, but from tech billionaires. For better or worse, that’s one prediction that has come to pass. Now if we can just solve world hunger and the housing crisis, maybe we can start work on that Mars base we all want so much. Because in the world of Encounter with Tiber, space exploration is not a distraction from the problems on Earth, but a means by which we can start fixing the issues back home. Just as it should be in the real world.

Stepping back from the space race, the middle act of the book takes us thousands of years into the past, with a doomed attempt by aliens to colonise the Earth. There are no ancient alien conspiracies here. No suggestion that aliens made us who we are. Just a tale of compounding tragedies of two species who could never live alongside one another. The Tiberians are a brilliantly realised alien species, and the illustrations help just as much as the technical diagrams do. It’s a bold move to stop in the middle of your story to tell a completely different, almost unrelated one, but for Aldrin and Barnes, the gamble pays off brilliantly.

Sitting comfortably at the intersection of hard SF, social SF, and tomorrow fiction, Encounter with Tiber does exactly what great science fiction ought to be doing. It takes the world as the authors know it, extrapolates a future from that. Throws in a few impossible ideas and weaves them seamlessly together. Regardless of its authorship, this book is quite simply magnificent.

Book Stats

• A Standalone Novel
• Published 1996
• 559 Pages