Distant Friends and Others

By Timothy Zahn

In love with fellow telepath Colleen Isaac, Dale Ravenhall realizes that the very thing that enables him and Colleen to read each other's minds would kill them both if they came within twenty miles of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0671721313
• ISBN13: 9780671721312
• Release Date: January 1983
• Publisher: Baen
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 6.8" x 1.0" x 4.0"

Customer Reviews

Excellent Short Story collection

Timothy Zahn is one of the most imaginative science fiction authors writing today. He has written a large number of novels, which range from fair to excellent, and is probably best known for his contributions to the "Star Wars" Universe, particularly the novels in which he bought to life the character of Grand Admiral Thrawn and his people, the Chiss. However, Zahn's four short story collections are perhaps his best achievement. This collection is named for a group of three short stories about the "distant friends," a group of telepaths who cannot travel within about twenty miles of each other or the amount of feedback between their brains will drive them insane. The narrator, Dale Ravenhall, has fallen helplessly in love with one of his fellow telepaths, Colleen Isaac - and knows that they can never meet. All these short stories are disciplined and to the point, as they have to be to make this format work: they are also very accessible and easy to read. As with his novels, Timothy Zahn's short stories are characterised not just by an amazing range of weird ideas about the creatures or scientific principles we might find in the universe, but also about the difficult moral choices which humans - and other intelligent creatures - might face as a result. Sometimes Zahn revisits the characters or wider universe he created in another short story. For example, "Distant Friends" contains the short story "The Evidence of things not seen," a direct sequel to the title short story of the book "Cascade Point." Also in "Distant Friends" is the short story "Final Solution" which describes mankind's first meeting with one of the "hive-mind" races, e.g. a species who have such powerful telepathy that effectively they share one mind. The hive mind is shocked and horrified to discover that one of the dangerous "fragmented" species (e.g. those in which each specimen is an individual) has survived to discover interstellar travel. Such races are always warlike and usually blow themselves to radioactive slag long before that stage. "Final solution" tells of the attempt by the humans involved in the first contact to learn from the hive mind how to bring an end to war. Zahn subsequently wrote another short story set in the same universe, called "Point Man", which can be found in the book "Star song and other stories. Some of these stories have a romantic element, some don't, and when they do the hero may or may not get the girl. Since Zahn doesn't write to a formula in this respect, you cannot always see a romance coming, or predict the outcome. This makes some of the stories more satisfying and others more poignant.