The Hercules Text
Written by Jack McDevitt
Narrated by Kevin T. Collins
3.5/5
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About this audiobook
From a remote corner of the galaxy a message is being sent. The continuous beats of a pulsar have become odd, irregular . . . artificial. It can only be a code.
Frantically, a research team struggles to decipher the alien communication. And what the scientists discover is destined to shake the foundations of empires around this world-from Wall Street to the Vatican . . .
Jack McDevitt
Jack McDevitt is the Nebula Award–winning author of The Academy series, including The Long Sunset. He attended La Salle University, then joined the Navy, drove a cab, became an English teacher, took a customs inspector’s job on the northern border, and didn’t write another word for a quarter-century. He received a master’s degree in literature from Wesleyan University in 1971. He returned to writing when his wife, Maureen, encouraged him to try his hand at it in 1980. Along with winning the Nebula Award in 2006, he has also been nominated for the Hugo Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and the Philip K. Dick Award. In 2015, he was awarded the Robert A. Heinlein Award for Lifetime Achievement. He and his wife live near Brunswick, Georgia.
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Reviews for The Hercules Text
82 ratings5 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5An impressive work. It does a great job of highlighting the kind of conflicts scientists and others must face when they make a great discoveries The conflicts faced by the Hercules team closely parallel those faced by the Oppenheimer team. As we know from the news, our artificial intelligence scientists are facing similar conflicts today. Let's hope there is wise as the Hercules team.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Remarkably less epic than I was anticipating but still did bring up some interesting questions about the morality of "first contact" and sharing information so that was nice. I can't help but to compare this to Carl Sagan's Contact, which I read recently. I thought Sagan was much too optimistic about humanity's ultimate response to the knowledge that we are not alone. This book, I felt, was much more realistic (or cynical, whichever you prefer) in that sense.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5During the height of the Cold War, NASA’s SETI program succeeds in contacting an alien civilization, who share their advanced science and mathematics. NASA’s bureaucrats try to keep everything under wraps, but their scientists (and contractors) build some of the devices described in the alien transmission. Bad things happen, as humans are just not ready to sensibly handle the results.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Just when everyone got convinced that there is noone out there and that we are all alone in the universe, a signal is picked up - from a place that noone expected - the Hercules system. And the signal is weird - it looks as if someone manipulates pulsars - and then it stops. Of course, it is a USA laboratory that picks it up and of course, there is an administrator that needs explanations so the scientists need to explain in a plain language what happened. It is a good way to do that actually - and considering that the novel was written 30 years ago, it is a standard way. Politicians get involved, careers almost get ruined due to the secrets and it looks like this initial transmission will be the only one. Until it starts again. And the team is assembled to try to understand what they are sending. Most first contact novels end up with the aliens coming to Earth or humanity bumping into them somewhere among the stars. McDevitt went for the much more likely scenario - we get a transmission that had been sent millions of years ago - that reach us, with no possibility to actually meet them. And while dealing with the message is, the novel deals with how it influences the world - both the people that know what had happened and the ones that can only rely in rumors. I wish he had expanded the focus and looked more at the outer world but that would have made the novel unwieldy. Instead McDevitt uses a Monitor between the chapters - with articles and headlines from the newspapers of the time. It works - it takes a while to start connecting the dots and to get the novel going but once you get used to the style, it is a page turner. At the end, it is a story of humanity - the Altheans (as they call them) and their message are just showing what we are. The scientists that did not look at a test because they knew what would see so missed to see that this star is not like any other; the president that is more concerned about defense than clean energy; the arrogant scientist that decides to experiment without understanding what he is doing; the pastor that causes a death because he does not realize what it will cause. And the human greed - the pure greed that had caused so many troubles in the past. McDevitt does not leave the church out of it as well - because such a message, the existence of aliens would influence the religions more than anything else. And his portrayal is sincere - both the parts that want to close their eyes and the ones that admit that they cannot do that anymore. When McDevitt decided to have the book reissued in 2015, he decided to revise it. And that weakened the book - I am not sure how extensive were the changes outside of the political views (past presidents and the big bad of the times) but it is uneven - in parts it reads as a 1986 novel set in the start of the 21st century; in places it reads as a thriller set in the time of writing. And that is annoying. I am not going to track down the old version - it is the same story after all and I did not like it that much - but I suspect that even if it had dated references and motives, it was more coherent. Especially when you expected to read a 1986 novel.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I was looking forward to reading this, as it had been billed as a rational but human story of first contact. I wasn't expecting what I found - almost a novelization of a tv mini-series. That's not to damn with faint praise, because the novel had all the immediacy of something I was watching on a tv screen, with all the pros and cons that come with that experience.Indeed, if this were made into a tv mini-series, it would be hailed as something interesting and intelligent. It was a very strange feeling to get from reading a book, and to some extent I have kept reading McDevitt just to see if he carries on with the trick. (He does.)