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Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel
Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel
Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel
Ebook833 pages13 hours

Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

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Set eighty years in the future, this novel by the best-selling author Michael O'Brien is about an expedition sent from the planet Earth to Alpha Centauri, the star closest to our solar system. The Kosmos, a great ship that the central character Neil de Hoyos describes as a "flying city", is immense in size and capable of more than half light-speed. Hoyos is a Nobel Prize winning physicist who has played a major role in designing the ship.

Hoyos has signed on as a passenger because he desires to escape the seemingly benign totalitarian government that controls everything on his home planet. He is a skeptical and quirky misanthropic humanist with old tragedies, loves, and hatreds that are secreted in his memory. The surprises that await him on the voyage-and its destination-will shatter all of his assumptions and point him to a true new horizon.

Science fiction and fantasy literature are genres that have become dominant forces in contemporary worldwide culture. Our fascination with the near-angelic powers of new technology, its benefits and dangers, its potential for obsession and catastrophe, raises vital questions that this work explores about human nature and the cosmos, about man's image of himself and where he is going-and why he seeks to go there.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateNov 4, 2013
ISBN9781681496146
Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel
Author

Michael D. O'Brien

Michael D. O'Brien, iconographer, painter, and writer, is the popular author of many best-selling novels including Father Elijah, Strangers and Sojourners, Elijah in Jerusalem, The Father's Tale, Eclipse of the Sun, Sophia House, The Lighthouse, and Island of the World. His novels have been translated into twelve languages and widely reviewed in both secular and religious media in North America and Europe.

Read more from Michael D. O'brien

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Rating: 4.392857214285714 out of 5 stars
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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This is a great book, well written with great plotting, vivid scenes & chatacters that I cared about. Unfortunately it would seem to be a vehicle for the idea that there is One True Religion. Ultimately it was disappointing.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A long, well-told novel with many interweaving story lines and well-developed characters, Voyage deals with the police state, mythology, and various sciences. At times the scientists' explanations and solutions seem too rushed and ill-conceived, but the book is long enough as it is; a few mysteries are held out until the very end, quite frustratingly, as they seem to be ongoing errors; the tone at times gets overly pious for my tastes, but does not detract too badly. There are no zombies, which cannot be said of much fiction these days. I'm well pleased I took the time to read it.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This book is a fantastic story. In many ways, O'Brien has shown in this book how prophetic he can be. The serpent dance that occurs later in the book reminds me quite a bit of some recent performances I've seen at various award shows. O'brien's society is one that is totalitarian and practices a soft form of Satanism, though the average person wouldn't have a problem with the constant surveillance of the nanny state or the new religion. In fact, they probably wouldn't acknowledge that any religion exists any more. (O'brien, unlike your average non-believer today, recognizes that humans need religion, and will readily replace true religion with false religion). I fully believe that the society that O'brien gives us, where true religion is heavily underground, and everyone is watched, could very well be our future. This is like a Catholic 1984.The drawbacks of the book are 1) Obrien's scientific theories which seem very dubious (though I am not a scientist, and neither is he) and 2) some scenes seem bizarre, including the scene where fire trucks are describe as being obsolete (which takes place around the 2030s).

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Voyage to Alpha Centauri - Michael D. O'Brien

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