2008 books

[peteryoung]

15) Paul Levinson, Borrowed Tides, 2001  ( RE-READ )
Since the first time I read this in 2002 I've sometimes wondered if my memory of it was not doing the book justice, but now after a second read I feel pretty much the same about it. Levinson's second novel comes across as a curious mix of interstellar exploration and Iroquois Indian myth, based on an ancient Amerindian story about the tides that flow in both directions along the Hudson River. An eight-year return trip to Alpha Centauri is dispatched with only enough fuel for a one way trip, the return journey to be made on the tides of a time stream that exist between Alpha Centauri and our sun, with the mission likely to arrive back home at the same time it departed. There is poorly-circumvented back-story problem in that the Iroquois lived at a latitude too far north to be able to see Alpha Centauri, so how would they know about it? But there are some good ideas here, and Levinson cleverly shows in a number of ways that the physical universe outside the solar system may just be raw material that can be altered by the presence of intelligence. But in too many respects the book only goes half-way to exploring its philosophical subject matter; it's involving, but Philip K. Dick or James Blish would have taken it much further.