Customer Reviews

Boundary

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Boundary is one of my favorite books, added to the list of my 'comfort books' to reread when I am stressed.

I am trying to do a spoiler-free review here.

This is a book about exploration and discovery. The scientists and engineers who are the main characters have dreams that they are working for, and this story is about how they are realized.

I like the characters; they are intelligent and passionate about what they do, and they are willing to work like beavers and _don't_ do stupid things. And they have a sense of humor.

I could go on for paragraphs about the main characters, but I won't. Just that I find them likable. And of the minor characters, my favorite is Nicholas Glendale, particularly for his quashing one of the few unpleasant minor characters in the book.

The romances are sweet, and nicely done, but sidelights to the main story of discovery.

This book has everything I look for in a science fiction book -- characters I care about, cool stuff, an upbeat tone, and a plot that makes sense.

If what you are looking for is grim and gritty 'realism' that involves small-minded people doing nasty stuff, this is not the book for you.

This book is bright in tone, with the idea that 'there is cool stuff there for us to discover' and nice and enthusiastic people going out to find it.

It is a lot of fun to read, and I highly recommend it. If you have any doubts, go read the sample available at the Baen website.

This is the best sf novel I've read in recent months.

In Arizona, paleontologist Helen Sutter finds a fossil that doesn't look like anything that ever existed. In New Mexico, A.J. Baker is designing sensors for the Ares Project, a private group trying to send a manned mission to Mars. And in Washington, Madeline Fathom is working for the "Homeland Investigation Agency," of which it's said 'The buck vanishes here.' When Helen's fossil turns out to be a 65 million year old alien, and A.J.'s sensors find proof that the aliens had a base orbiting Mars, Sutter, Baker, Fathom and others are headed to Mars.

This is the kind of science fiction that isn't written much anymore, "hard sf," where the author tries to extrapolate what will be possible in a few decades. Arthur C. Clarke did it magnificently in novels like _Prelude to Space_ and _Sands of Mars_. _Boundary_ ranks with those masterpieces.

Highly recommended.

Set in the near future, Boundary is a fun, humor-filled and adventure ready read of daring-dos, fantastic finds, space travel and a little romance!

An unexplained and possible career destroying find is found in the midst of bone dig in backwoods Montana.

As a private company prepares to beat NASA to Mars with the intention of claiming the planet in the name of the company, the USA and profit, another discover throws those plans along with the human race into a tizzy. For what was found in Montana has found in a room, behind a door, on Phobos, one of Mar's moons.

Visitors from another world had already been to earth... a very long, long time ago... The fear and dreams and hopes of an entire planet look to Phobos and Mars and the Boundary of past, present and future.

A very good read, I highly recommend it and look forward the rest of the series!!

There seem to be relatively few good science fiction novels these days that are primarily about science and exploration. Boundry is one of them. I really enjoyed this book and urge you to try it. Further, I would encourage you to read any of the works of these two authors.

Yes, this is a March book. I got an advanced copy and read it in five days. Read on and you'll see why I liked it.

Dr. Helen Sutter is a hard-working, middle-aged paleontologist returning to Montana for another summer's "dig" when a strange fossil found by the daughter of the ranch owner on whose property she is working leads to the fossilized skeleton of an extra-terrestial creature who died on Earth 65 million years ago. She calls it "Bemmie" (remember the"bug-eyed-monster" in `50's SF?). It is entwined with the fossils of three dinosaurs he apparently killed in a last (and losing) battle. All of them are literally lying on top of the K-T boundary. The boundary is that between the Cretaceous Period and the Tertiary Period in the geological history of Earth, about 65 million years ago when an asteroid or comet hit in what is now the Yucatan Peninsula, killing off 75% of the planet's species, including all those dinosaurs. It is such a strange find that accusations of scientific fraud soon follow.

Helen's reputation is saved, and her life irreversibly changed, when an unmanned mission to Phobos, one of the two moons of Mars, sends back imagery of a mummified version of Bemmie. Since all of this is set in about the third decade of the 21st century, we have no trouble believing the science/engineering of the sensor technology and rocket propulsion needed for both the initial mission to Phobos and Mars and the follow-up to exploit the Bemmie discovery.

I love the deftness with which the authors pull together a core group of four characters at the Montana dig site who carry us through the entire novel. A.J. Baker, an archetypical computer geek and sensor tech genius, gets called into to obtain remote imagery of the Montana Bemmie (using Ground Penetrating Radar, etc.). A couple of years later he is running the remote sensor suite that discovers Bemmie on Phobos. Add in a couple of Helen's colleagues, import a female secret agent type whose mission is to secure the ET technology that has military potential, and you have a quartet of very likeable characters.

This was not a short book, but it kept me up late at night reading. I can't wait for the two sequels that are under contract (according to the author's posting above). What Bemmie's race has been doing in the past 65 million years and whether we will enjoy meeting them are just a few questions that I want answered.

The title of this book refers to the KT boundary: that is, the transition between the Cretaceous and Tertiary geologic periods. This, of course, is when the dinosaurs became extinct, an event now widely thought to have been caused by the impact which caused the Chixculub crater off Mexico. This book opens, a couple of decades in the future, with a pretty and brilliant paleontologist, Helen Sutter, along with handsome and brilliant engineer Joe Buckley and pretty and brilliant Native American amateur paleontologist Jackie Secord and handsome and brilliant and unconventional sensor tech expert A. J. Baker, discovering a really unusual fossil: a completely implausible creature, with tentacles and all, facing off against a bunch of raptors. And the raptors have weird punctures in their bones ...

No reader will be surprised to learn that this creature is an alien. But Helen causes her career a lot of problems when she puts forth this theory. (I should add that I found this aspect of the novel thoroughly plausible.) The book itself, however, shifts gears a bit, as many of the protagonists are involved in a couple of competing efforts to build spaceships to travel to Mars. A. J. is part of a privately financed project based on Robert Zubrin's ideas, while Joe is part of NASA's efforts. But eventually the two projects join forces to an extent, and A. J.'s sensors help make an amazing discovery on an unmanned flight to Phobos -- an alien base, with skeletons in it that look a lot like Helen Sutter's fossil.

What follows then is a mix of fairly old-fashioned "we build a spaceship and travel to Mars" stuff with fairly old-fashioned "lets solve the mystery of what aliens were doing on Phobos, and what that had to do with the Chixculub event". Mixed among the techy stuff and the mystery stuff is some good old thrills and danger. And of course various love stories.

All this is pretty entertaining and a good fast read. But there's really not very much new at all here. And there are structural problems: the book is not so much a novel as a collection of sequentially related incidents. Even the major mystery at the heart of the book (what were the aliens doing here?) isn't really resolved in a very satisfying way (which isn't to say it isn't resolved -- the authors don't cheat us.) The characters are pretty stock, and their interactions seem a bit forced. All in all: minor work. Solid professional entertainment, but nothing particularly special. No real spark.

Others reviewers have already summarized the plot, so I won't repeat that. The story is well presented and has enough interesting plot twists and cliffhangers to keep you from putting the book down.

But what I really enjoyed about the book is that it is unashamedly written both by and to lovers of Science Fiction. I consider myself fairly well read in the Science Fiction field, and there were numerous references that I didn't catch. The story is classic, hard Sci-Fi. It has one assumption (ie; aliens visited the Earth 65 million years ago) and then the rest is a realistic extrapolation of what might be possible in the near future. It's not a satire, or in any way silly. But I found myself laughing out loud several times, and chuckling every few pages. This is a book you have to read carefully, or else you miss some of the little passing references that make it fun.

Someone complained about the characters being shallow. Perhaps, in the sense that they didn't all have complete biographies, they were. But I don't learn to like characters by reading their resumes. I get to know them by watching them, and listening to them and laughing with them. I grew to like these characters and am eagerly awaiting the sequel to Boundary (which is already in the works). Although the book came to a reasonably satisfying conclusion, there were enough teasers in the plot to leave plenty of room to continue for another couple of books.

If you liked Rendevous with Rama, or Fountains of Paradise or other "Man against nature" classic SF, you ought to like this. Boundary invokes the "natural adventure" concept. There aren't any bad guys, there isn't an evil empire, there are a bunch of smart people trying to do things that are really really hard, sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing.

A recent book with similar feel, but more gosh-wow "science" would be Varley's "Red Thunder". Boundary however is entirely possible unlike Varley's story. It's a memorable cast of characters who work together in interesting ways. Unlike another reviewer I am excited to see books that recognize that in the real world, things happen from teams of people.

I liked it. Five stars.

Space ships and dinosaurs are not an obvious combination but they work pretty well together in this case and they provide a good story.

A paleontologist working a dig makes a fantastic discovery. She uncovers some of the best raptor specimens ever found. She also uncovers something completely new and different. It doesn't even seem...terrestrial. Her discoveries threaten her career because they threaten the reputations and theories of other academic types. That would be a sure road to oblivion for her if it were not for one thing. Her helpers on the dig really work for NASA and they recognize some strange correlations between their summer jobs with the paleontologist and what they are finding in space. Thus is born the new discipline of astro-paleontology. Its also a good story well worth the reading.

Two things brought me to read this novel. One, I finally realized that the boundary of the title was the K/T boundary. (If you aren't a paleontology geek, read that as "the huge explosion that killed all the dinosaurs.") Two, I read Ryk Spoor's only solo novel to date, "Digital Knight," and loved it.

It's a near-future world -- better space travel and computers, mostly. Strange fossils at a dinosaur site lead a group of scientists to evidence of an alien civilization, maybe two. The clues lead them to Mars, where they have to deal with both the problems of survival and the political fallout of the new-old technologies they discover.

Flint and Spoor stay strictly with what the human characters find out or guess about the extinct civilization, no flashbacks to alien times. I think that shows integrity. It also gives the book a bit of a detective-story structure. In that way it's something like a modern retelling of James P. Hogan's "Inherit the Stars." The characters are good, the science is good, and I can't wait for the sequel.