{"id":563,"date":"2007-03-13T22:23:32","date_gmt":"2007-03-14T04:23:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/?p=563"},"modified":"2009-06-03T15:53:33","modified_gmt":"2009-06-03T20:53:33","slug":"horizons-book-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/?p=563","title":{"rendered":"Horizons – Book Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>It’s always a treat to find\u00a0a new author\u00a0to enjoy, and I think I’ve\u00a0accomplished\u00a0that\u00a0in discovering\u00a0Mary\u00a0Rosenblum, the author of Horizons<\/em>.\u00a0 This book is about\u00a0how\u00a0human civilization might develop and evolve in space, in\u00a0places\u00a0which\u00a0are connected to earth\u00a0via Space Elevators.<\/p>\n

I don’t want to spoil the plot, so I’m not going to summarize the book here – you can find a summary, if you want it,\u00a0at the Amazon.com site<\/a>.\u00a0 But I do have some comments about how the Space Elevator is used in the book.\u00a0 First of all, Ms. Rosenblum has done her homework on how a Space Elevator might actually function; indeed, she\u00a0gives credit to\u00a0Dr. Bradley Edwards “…extensive work on the realities of the Space Elevator…”.\u00a0 The Space Elevator she envisions seems to be the same one that Dr. Edwards has laid out.\u00a0 The amount of time it takes to travel between the Earth and the Elevator-based colonies is both realistic and significant in the story.\u00a0 She also has postulated four Space Elevators, each with their own colony, each run by a different organization\/government and all is close proximity to each other, again quite believable.\u00a0 Finally, she has painted scenarios where the inhabitants of the Space Elevator colonies could actually threaten Earth and makes this fact, too, integral to the story.<\/p>\n

Other future possibilities she posits, including hard-wired links in the brain to\u00a0a future version of\u00a0the Internet, are both possible and probable.\u00a0 And she foresees a huge, perhaps even leading role for China in the future, again something that is quite possible.<\/p>\n

Her grasp of technology is solid and her extrapolation of how\u00a0it might evolve was truly well done.\u00a0 IMHO, however, I don’t think her development of the characters quite matches it.\u00a0 Some character changes and outcomes were just too convenient, or too\u00a0jarring\u00a0at times and somewhat marred an otherwise excellent effort.\u00a0 However, in the relative scheme of things, that’s a small complaint.<\/p>\n

Overall, however,\u00a0I quite enjoyed the book and would recommend it to anyone who wants to see how a future, Space-Elevator based civilization might develop.<\/p>\n

(Click on the thumbnail of the Cover to see an enlarged version)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s always a treat to find\u00a0a new author\u00a0to enjoy, and I think I’ve\u00a0accomplished\u00a0that\u00a0in discovering\u00a0Mary\u00a0Rosenblum, the author of Horizons.\u00a0 This book is about\u00a0how\u00a0human civilization might develop and evolve in space, in\u00a0places\u00a0which\u00a0are connected to earth\u00a0via Space Elevators. I don’t want to spoil the plot, so I’m not going to summarize the book here – you can find […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-563","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=563"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}