his short (154 pages) novel consists of six novelettes and short stories, each of which was previously published in Analog magazine. Together they tell the story—with large gaps of time and event between installments—of mankind's journey to the stars.
In "The Giftie," 50-something aerospace engineer Adrian Mast is browsing through wacko UFO titles at elderly Frances Farmstead's used-book store when he stumbles across a volume titled Gift From the Stars, the appendix of which contains schematics for an interstellar spacecraft powered by controlled matter-antimatter reactions. Mast buys the book and soon becomes convinced that the plans will work. He hypothesizes that unknown aliens, for as yet obscure reasons, want humanity to possess and employ this technology.
With Farmstead's help, Mast tracks the author, one Peter Cavendish, to a mental institution, where Cavendish, suffering from schizophrenia, confirms that the information contained in his book came from outer space. The uncertainty of the aliens' intentions in supplying it seems to have driven him mad, however. Mast and Farmstead suspect government involvement, and sure enough, they are shortly warned by a federal official to back off their search or suffer the consequences. But our heroes outwit the feds and arrange for the information to be publicly disseminated.
Once the genie is out of the bottle, life on Earth changes drastically, with the introduction of limitless energy. Most people are satisfied with the new order, but our heroes still dream of the stars. In "Pow'r" and "The Abyss," Adrian and Frances, along with a nubile new character, Jessica Buhler, and a cured, or at any rate medicated, Cavendish, build the ship and, with a crew of 200, embark on a journey that takes them through a wormhole ("The Rabbit Hole") and to their ultimate destination ("Uncreated Night"), where answers—and more questions—await ("Strange Shadows").
A gift to return unopened
In a preface, Gunn states that Gift From the Stars was written in response to Carl Sagan's Contact, which he felt set out an implausible first-contact scenario. "I planned it from the beginning as a novel exploring 'the way it would really be,'" he writes. Yet there is nothing remotely realistic about this clumsily executed, poorly conceived novel, which reads as if the author has been in cold storage since about 1943. It's so bad on every level that its serial publication in Analog and now in book form seems explicable only by the respect Gunn has earned in a long and productive career. But surely there are better ways to acknowledge a writer's achievements than to publish his markedly inferior work.
Gunn does not demonstrate that his scenario for first contact is any more reasonable than Sagan's. On the contrary, it hinges on a string of unlikely coincidences, inexplicable motivations and unrealistic actions. As the creaky plot, such as it is, moves forward, this dependence grows stronger, as does a regrettable reliance upon gender stereotypes and the hoariest of clichés about faster-than-light/wormhole travel and artificial intelligence.
A few examples will suffice. Apparently numerous copies of Cavendish's book were published before being suppressed by the government. A single copy survives and winds up coming to the attention of an aerospace engineer, no genius, yet who somehow, from gazing at incomplete plans in an appendix, decides they are the real McCoy. Puh-leese. Then, using her stellar Internet skills, which the engineer somehow lacks, the elderly bookstore owner tracks down the publisher, who for some unknown reason has kept detailed records of the book the government had forced him to suppress; not only that, but without requiring proof in the form of federal ID, he accepts our heroes' bald-faced assertion that they are federal agents and tells them everything they want to know. Double puh-leese. And when the feds finally catch up with our heroes, the extent of their threats is simply to "discredit" them; not to mention the means by which our heroes outwit the feds, a contrivance so overused as to discredit any writer who employs it and any editor who allows it.
The novel requires readers to swallow ever-more-outlandish assertions. When the ship, with a crew of 200, or 203 including our heroes, is hijacked by a rogue computer program, we are expected to believe that not a single person on board knows how to program a computer! Further, entirely too much willing suspension of disbelief is necessary to accept Adrian, who demonstrates absolutely no qualifications for the position of omnicompetent man, as captain of the ship, with Frances and Jessica as his officers.
Gunn attempts some romantic interplay between Adrian, Frances and Jessica, but it's embarrassingly hackneyed, with Adrian exhibiting the emotional range of an adolescent with Asperger's, Jessica acting like that boy's fantasy come true, and Frances (50-something herself now, thanks to a rejuvenation treatment) nobly putting aside her dreams of a relationship with Adrian in the interest of the survival of the species, to which she might still be able to contribute, as Jessica notes with a robotic sangfroid typical of Gunn's dialogue: "Your uterus might not be up to the pregnancy bit, but your ova may well be harvestable."
Gunn calls Gift "a light-hearted look at the issues of alien contact," and some of the problems identified above can perhaps be explained as attempts at a sort of humor, knowingly winking at the audience while pursuing a more serious examination of ideas. But if so, the humor falls flat, and the book is more light-minded than light-hearted.
