Encounter With Tiber by Buzz Aldrin & John Barnes Paperback

The marketing gimmick of prominently displaying Buzz Aldrin's name worked this time.   That's what attracted me to this book.

This book is in three parts.  The first is set in the near future when man learns unequivocally of the existence of aliens.  The second and third are translations of two aliens' memoirs.  And then there's an historian character to provide exposition to tie everything together.

The early bits are really interesting.  You can really see Aldrin's influence on the bits regarding space hardware and procedures.  At one point a shuttle loses all its engines soon after launch and we learn exactly how the emergency egress pole is supposed to work.  It makes a lot more sense to me, now.  But just as interesting to me was the portrayal of the professionalism of the characters during the incident.  And the thoroughness of the procedures.

Later in the first section, we see a lot of politics and PR endangering the astronauts.   Parts of that were pretty annoying for me.  It seemed to me that they were dealing with a priceless artifact and any commander in the field that was worth anything would have refused those obviously life-threatening and risky orders.

The rise of commercial human access to space was interesting.  Unfortunately, the way they describe it requires a single charismatic person, so it's not something we can count on it in real life.

The middle section deals with the alien homeworld.  Their star and planetary system, the societies, the prejudices some of the physical characteristics of the aliens, some of the politics.  They did a good job depicting how their planet produced two fairly isolated societies.  The societies were basically pragmatists vs dreamers.   The pragmatists bulled through with what they had.  The dreamers produced the arts and sciences but were mired in people wanting to talk about what they were going to do rather than do it.  Basically, a metaphor to more clearly delineate some of the differences in human society.  Much the same was done with the prejudices, making race differences slightly more pronounced than skin color among humans but still trivial enough that the characters can realistically work through them.

Once again, I didn't agree with some of the decisions made by the crew when they arrived at their destination.

The third section is another group of aliens.  Part of this group has institutionalized political correctness.  There's a Soviet-style political officer-type person on board who makes decisions by ignoring reality.  But the predicaments that leaves them in lead to resourcefulness and hope.

I found the technical parts of the book interesting and the metaphors thought-provoking.  On Mighty's Total Book Value Scale, Paperback.

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