Distant Friends and Others [Paperback]

Timothy Zahn (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: 1983

From the Hugo Award-winning author of Warhorse, Deadman Switch, and Heir to the Empire. Fellow telepaths Dale Ravenhall and Colleen Isaac have a problem: they're in love--but if they get within a thousand miles of each other, the same ability that allows them to read minds will kill them. Their only hope is to construct a shield against telepathy. Only then can they hope to be more than Distant Friends.

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Baen (1983)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0671721313
• ISBN-13: 978-0671721312
• Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 4.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #475,018 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Short Story collection, June 20, 2006

By 

Marshall Lord (Whitehaven, UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Distant Friends and Others (Paperback)

Timothy Zahn is one of the most imaginative science fiction authors writing today. He has written a large number of novels, which range from fair to excellent, and is probably best known for his contributions to the "Star Wars" Universe, particularly the novels in which he bought to life the character of Grand Admiral Thrawn and his people, the Chiss. However, Zahn's four short story collections are perhaps his best achievement.

This collection is named for a group of three short stories about the "distant friends," a group of telepaths who cannot travel within about twenty miles of each other or the amount of feedback between their brains will drive them insane. The narrator, Dale Ravenhall, has fallen helplessly in love with one of his fellow telepaths, Colleen Isaac - and knows that they can never meet.

All these short stories are disciplined and to the point, as they have to be to make this format work: they are also very accessible and easy to read.

As with his novels, Timothy Zahn's short stories are characterised not just by an amazing range of weird ideas about the creatures or scientific principles we might find in the universe, but also about the difficult moral choices which humans - and other intelligent creatures - might face as a result.

Sometimes Zahn revisits the characters or wider universe he created in another short story. For example, "Distant Friends" contains the short story "The Evidence of things not seen," a direct sequel to the title short story of the book "Cascade Point."

Also in "Distant Friends" is the short story "Final Solution" which describes mankind's first meeting with one of the "hive-mind" races, e.g. a species who have such powerful telepathy that effectively they share one mind. The hive mind is shocked and horrified to discover that one of the dangerous "fragmented" species (e.g. those in which each specimen is an individual) has survived to discover interstellar travel. Such races are always warlike and usually blow themselves to radioactive slag long before that stage. "Final solution" tells of the attempt by the humans involved in the first contact to learn from the hive mind how to bring an end to war. Zahn subsequently wrote another short story set in the same universe, called "Point Man", which can be found in the book "Star song and other stories.

Some of these stories have a romantic element, some don't, and when they do the hero may or may not get the girl. Since Zahn doesn't write to a formula in this respect, you cannot always see a romance coming, or predict the outcome. This makes some of the stories more satisfying and others more poignant.