Lsura
March 31, 2017, 10:54pm
1
This was posted on reddit , and it sounds familiar. I’d like to know what it is, if anyone here can figure it out (note, I’m not the original poster of the question, but I’ll take suggestions to that thread and come back with answers).
I’m guessing this book would be pre-2005, maybe older. I believe it was a fairly standard-sized paperback at the time that I picked up and flicked though, but didn’t buy/borrow/steal at the time.
It begins with a group of space-gods starting a new game. They each choose or draw a different alien race and the winning god has to get their species to advance furthest technologically and culturally.
Unfortunately one of the gods has drawn, “Humanity”, which in galactic terms has barely got out of the “hitting each other with rocks” part of evolution and isn’t even close to developing a faster-than-light drive.
Apparently going faster than light isn’t actually that difficult, in terms of getting the physics right and building a drive unit to implement it. The problem is accelerating to faster than light speed in any reasonable time without compressing your face into the back of your skull and splattering your brains across half the solar system before you even get halfway there. You need an inertial dampener.
Luckily, by some strange chance (and possibly influenced by one of the gods playing the game) one of the humans has just found such a device underneath an old bedsheet in his closet.
I think that’s up to about page 10 of the book, and all I can remember. I think the rest of the book is about humans setting a proper commercial space agency using this new technology.
Any ideas please anyone?
It sounds horribly familiar to me, but I don’t know if it’s because it’s a mishmash of various plots (Pratchett has a scene where the gods are playing a board game with the races of the Disc) or if I read it. I am reaching out to others that are voracious scifi consumers as well.
The Pratchett scene is from Interesting Times . Just because I feel you’d want to know.
Thank you. I suspected it was, but didn’t want to misspeak.
Fenris
April 1, 2017, 1:04am
5
It sounds Alan Dean Foster-y to me.