Death of a Planet

Death of a Planet
Authors
Duggan, James
Publisher
James Duggan
Date
2018-11-03T00:00:00+00:00
Size
0.23 MB
Lang
en
Downloaded: 56 times

Earth is faced with total destruction by a threat from outer space which never in the entire history of the planet has been experienced by its inhabitants; neither man nor beast.

After wandering the surface of the planet for only a couple of hundred thousand years in the whole four and a half billion years of its existence humans would be doomed.

Can Pat Buchanan and his strange young associate together with a combination of scientists, industrialists and national governments do anything to avoid a total catastrophe?

This tale is a work of fiction, but is it such a great leap of faith to suspend disbelief and accept that the events as related could…just could…happen?

Consider this. The Universe is 13½ billion years old. Earth is thought to be 4½ billion years old. Life in its crudest form has been on Earth for 3 billion years. Modern humans have been around for only 200,000 of those years.

In just the last 200 years science and technology have advanced exponentially. With the Earth thought to be only half way through its life cycle we have 4½ billion years to move them on beyond our wildest imagination.

Try to see in your mind's eye what advances might evolve in that time and what other civilizations might have already achieved in a universe this old and over 90 billion light years across.

When he was editing this tale prior to publication the author noticed several words and phrases, in common use in the English language, which he realized matched the titles of Beatles songs.

‘Ticket to ride’, ‘Yesterday’, ‘Help’, ‘Get back’ and ‘Let it be’ are just a five examples.

It was not intentional, but it made him curious, so he obtained a list of their titles and did a word search. he was astonished to find no fewer than eighty-seven of their titles scattered throughout the narrative. There may even be more; the list was not comprehensive since their portfolio of songs is so vast.

If you happen to be a Beatles fan reading this you might want to test your knowledge of their work and see how many you can spot.

Otherwise just try and enjoy his first attempt at science fiction writing. You might find the story line original since he has never read a Sci Fi book to colour his thinking.