Collision Course (Ace SF, No. 11510)

By Robert Silverberg

Book Overview

After four centuries of space travel Man was supreme. human civilization had spread to hundreds of planets, and never, *never* had the colonists found a trace of another intelligent species. Humanity... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• ISBN: B000QTXS2W
• Release Date: January 1961
• Publisher: Ace Books
• Length: 180 Pages
• Weight: 0.05 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Short book. Nice impact. Very well rounded

This is a short book the more or less criticizes the entire notion of Manifest Destiny. It concerns a group of earth representatives of various fields trying to create a peace treaty with a newly discovered group of aliens who have similar empire building notions. Most of the time the aliens are off screen, so to speak, and the action is on the group of experts who fight, cajole each other and generally get on each others nerves. The most fascinating character is the neo-Puritan who tries to accept everything with a religious calm and sensibility which generally bothers and annoys his less stabile co-workers. The hero of the story becomes less concerned with the mission and more concerned with his personal folly which is a reflection of the personal folly of expansionism.This might not be a classic of science fiction and may only be one of the better books of the fifties when science fiction talked about space ships and technology more than real people, but it is a great work and it should rank up with Childhood's End and teh Foundation series because in many ways it surpasses these texts.