Peter Cawdron
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/peter.cawdron
Good things come in threes, to phrase a coin. Over the past 14 months I’ve ‘discovered’ Joe Abercrombie and Andy Weir, nether of whom were discovered as much as I stumbled along admiring butterflies or something, and someone put one of their books in my path.
So it stands to no reason at all that I would encounter a third writer who sparked my imagination, and who I found utterly engrossing, and who showed frequent flashes of brilliance and/or humor.
Peter Cawdron, New Zealand-born Australian SF writer, has been around for a while.
He has written 18 First Contact novels dating back to 2011. This isn’t a series: Each is a stand-alone novel with entirely different sets of humans, aliens, and circumstances. Writing one First Contact novel is intellectually demanding (I should know). But eighteen? I can’t even…
I elected to read his earliest and his latest after getting about half-way through his latest. The writing in Cold Eyes was solid enough that even if it totally came apart at the seams by the end, the worst I would say would be that it was an interesting failure. As my readers know, I don’t review items that are a waste of my time. Who am I to waste your time?
Spoiler: It doesn’t come apart at the seams, although the ending is refreshingly unexpected.
So, let’s start with the first novel, Anomaly. An ordinary science school teacher who happens to be on the scene at the right time gets roped into a project that turns out to be a First Contact. If that sounds familiar, I’ll point out that Cawdron wrote this a full ten years before Andy Weir’s brilliant Project Hail Mary. In both stories, the teacher has a brilliant insight that leads to his being brought on board. In this instance, the brilliant moment involves nothing more complicated than a helium balloon, which leads to a wonderfully original Rosetta Stone. Solid characters, vivid imagery, and bright flashes of wit and insight abound, and make this a brief (180 pages) but massively entertaining read.
According to FantasticFiction.com, “Cold Eyes is an original First Contact novel, written as a tribute to the 1974 science fiction classic, The Mote in God’s Eye, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.” And they add this cravat: “Warning: The most absurd part of this story is true and accurately portrayed.”
Stephen King’s ‘gotcha’ occurs from the first page. A guy wakes up in a transparent tube. He is naked, covered in slime, and has a raging boner. A beautiful young female tech is peering in at him. As if that weren’t awkward enough, he can’t remember who he is or why he is there. Or where ‘there’ is. The tech smiles, glances down, and says, “It’s nothing I haven’t seen before” which of course utterly fails to reassure.
However, it turns out that she has seen it before, or at least one much like it. Our man is a clone, created from an original back on Earth who was heavily trained in determining the ways of effectively and accurately communicating with aliens. He remembers enough to know that his body, that of an eighteen year old, is not what he was cloned from. He was a 70-something year old named Dali Patel. The young tech, it turns out, is also a clone, the captain of the ship, and his wife of fifty plus years.
Being on a space ship and preparing to meet aliens is also a shock, and it becomes rapidly apparent that the cloning process partially failed: the clone retains enough to have the personality and intelligence of the original, but all the knowledge and experience needed for his job has failed to transfer.
Each clone took eighteen months to force grow from embryo to 18 year old human, and he was to be the fourth and final. Two of the four members want to rubbish the new clone and build a new one. But Sharon, the captain, sees her husband’s personality in the clone, and besides, time has run out. They are only months from reaching their destination the fourth planet orbiting Gliese 237B. There is alien life there, including intelligent life. They want to meet it.
Dali not only has to take charge of establishing communication with alien life without decades of experience, but he has to do the same with himself. He has to prove he is a reliable and trustworthy member of the team while engaging in what could be the most important negotiations in human history.
The planet is a super-Earth, with about 1.5 surface gravity and a correspondingly thick atmosphere. The inhabitants, nicknamed ‘Beebs” have no fissionable materials, reflecting the metallicity properties of their red dwarf sun. And the thick atmosphere and gravity means that it is physically impossible to get a chemical rocket to orbit (it’s only barely possible on Earth!). So while technologically advanced, the Beebs are incapable of reaching orbit, let alone interstellar travel.
The Beebs have huge boom-and-bust cycles, punctuated by massive global wars. The crew of the Magellan, the UN warship they arrived in, have to factor that into their determination about what to do about the Beebs.
The Magellan, incidentally, uses a constant acceleration drive that operates by increasing gravity in front of the ship and decreasing it behind the ship, creating a kind of quantum hyperloop. As soon as I realized Earth had such a technology, I wondered how they could keep it secret from the Beebs. Just knowing it was possible would send them into a frenzy.
Cawdron comes up with an elegant solution to this concern, and his solution is much less bleak than that postulated by Niven and Pournelle. It is also considerably more imaginative, and despite appearances, technologically plausible.
Cawdron’s large library of books and short story collections (about 60 in all) are available at Goodreads, Amazon, and through the Kindle library. These are must-reads for Hard SF enthusiasts.
