Aphelion

There's no telling the characters apart in this one, except by name.

Beyond that, I can hardly wait to see what Bill has to say about it . . .

I think I know at least one thing Bill will jump on . . . it seems, in the story, that the Earth-based researchers are in real-time communication with the goings-on on Europa. I already know that ain't happening. The distance from Earth to Jupiter can be anywhere from 600 million to a billion kilometers. Light goes fast, but not that fast. Sorry, but my poor old brain is so mathematically bankrupt these days that I didn't feel like calculating the transit time for a signal.

Also, the story suggested that Europa has its own magnetic field, and from what I've looked at, this isn't likely, although it does interact magnetically with Jupiter, most likely by induction.

C'mon, Bill, do yer stuff!

gino_ss wrote:Recall that the earth bound folks had use of that neat little space-folding gravity drive feature that allowed them to travel to and from Europa in almost real time.

gino

Not quite -- quoting from the story itself:

Merchant said, "Stephen, I can get you to Europa and back in days.

That's days for a physical trip; light-speed telemetry is still gonna take hours each way.

Lester Curtis wrote:

gino_ss wrote:Recall that the earth bound folks had use of that neat little space-folding gravity drive feature that allowed them to travel to and from Europa in almost real time.

gino

Not quite -- quoting from the story itself:

Merchant said, "Stephen, I can get you to Europa and back in days.

That's days for a physical trip; light-speed telemetry is still gonna take hours each way.

Well, not necessarily... if the graviton drive really does 'fold space', signals might take seconds instead of days to make the trip (while the ship, traveling much slower than light, would still take days instead of many months). (How long did Discovery and Discovery II take to get to Jupiter orbit in "2001"?)

There's another thing that irks me about this story -- they extracted one single organism from a whole ecology, and it goes whacko. Where does that begin to make sense? The creatures were obviously mortal -- their captive specimen did die on them, after all . . . so, why doesn't the whole planet spin out of orbit when one of them (much less a daily lot of 'em) dies of natural causes?

Lester Curtis wrote:There's another thing that irks me about this story -- they extracted one single organism from a whole ecology, and it goes whacko. Where does that begin to make sense? The creatures were obviously mortal -- their captive specimen did die on them, after all . . . so, why doesn't the whole planet spin out of orbit when one of them (much less a daily lot of 'em) dies of natural causes?

Here's something that just occurred to me: Europa didn't leave its orbit on a collision course with Earth by accident. The ocean-spanning hive mind took the entire moon in search of its stolen member! If it was just a miniscule (as it must have been) change in the field generated by the life forms acting en masse that took Europa out of its Jupiter orbit, the likelihood that the trajectory would come anywhere near ANYTHING (except Jupiter itself) would be infinitesimal. And remember that the hive mind was able to change the trajectory so that Europa went into orbit around the Earth's moon once it / they received 'word' of what had happened...

That reduces the scientific absurdities to just two: the existence of a hive mind in the ocean under Europa's icy 'skin', and the ability of that hive mind to generate electromagnetic fields more powerful than Jupiter's gravity and to either sense or track an individual or small sub-colony across interplanetary distances. (Wait -- maybe that's THREE scientific absurdities.)

Oh, and don't forget -- these critters have to see where they're going, too!

Damn, they just get more improbable, I mean, more impressive by the minute!

Mark wrote:

Lester, It is not seemly for a critic, especially one who is a writer himself, to take apparent enjoyment at flagging another author's work with comments laced with insults about his ability to write a competent story.

Gino . . .my apologies if I came across as too harsh; I don't intend to insult.

Believe me, though, I'm AT LEAST this harsh on my self, and frequently more so; the rest of you just don't get to see that. If I find myself writing something that sticks out as too improbable, I change it. Had to completely restart my novel project because some of the initial premises and circumstances were too unlikely. Major plot change, shifting of characters, the whole works. It really hurt, because I loved a good deal of the stuff I'd had, but the result IS better.

Sarcasm is, unfortunately, in my nature. I try to keep aware of it, and don't always succeed. Nonetheless, for me, the story does raise too many questions that don't get explained, and I found myself being taken out of the story by these. That's the important issue.

Gino, on the plus side, I did like the way you built tension in the story. It had a somewhat similar feel to the way Michael Crichton wrote. Fast-moving, easy to read, and I didn't anticipate the ending, either.

Instead of Europa, this could have taken place on Enceladus:

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/sc ... enceladus/