Helene

This book was the winner of the 2006 Hugo Award.

Product description:
One night in October when he was ten years old, Tyler Dupree stood in his back yard and watched the stars go out. They all flared into brilliance at once, then disappeared, replaced by a flat, empty black barrier. He and his best friends, Jason and Diane Lawton, had seen what became known as the Big Blackout. It would shape their lives.

The effect is worldwide. The sun is now a featureless disk–a heat source, rather than an astronomical object. The moon is gone, but tides remain. Not only have the world?s artificial satellites fallen out of orbit, their recovered remains are pitted and aged, as though they?d been in space far longer than their known lifespans. As Tyler, Jason, and Diane grow up, a space probe reveals a bizarre truth: The barrier is artificial, generated by huge alien artifacts. Time is passing faster outside the barrier than inside–more than a hundred million years per year on Earth. At this rate, the death throes of the sun are only about forty years in our future.

Jason, now a promising young scientist, devotes his life to working against this slow-moving apocalypse. Diane throws herself into hedonism, marrying a sinister cult leader who?s forged a new religion out of the fears of the masses.

Earth sends terraforming machines to Mars to let the onrush of time do its work, turning the planet green. Next they send humans?and immediately get back an emissary with thousands of years of stories to tell about the settling of Mars. Then Earth?s probes reveal that an identical barrier has appeared around Mars. Jason, desperate, seeds near space with self-replicating machines that will scatter copies of themselves outward from the sun–and report back on what they find.

Life on Earth is about to get much, much stranger.

My review:
The book starts great by presenting a mystery that is slowly revealed through the whole book. For most of the book, I can’t stop reading because I need to know what happens next.

The ending wasn’t entirely what I expected, but Robert Charles Wilson have already written the second book and is probably writing on his third now (which will have the name Vortex), so the tale is not finished.

Farscape is one of the best science fiction series ever made. It was cancelled after four seasons in 2003. I came over it when I was in Melbourne in 2002 and from time to time I check out if something has happened.

To my utter happiness I found out they have released the series on ITunes for 40 USD a season. I bought some episodes in 2002, but the series was so expensive in DVD that I never bought a complete season. Now, I would love to buy it, but my account there is for the norwegian store.

I have to try to create an american itunes account, the problem is that they even check if your credit card is american. The only option I haven’t tried is specifying Paypal as my payment method. I can only hope that helps, but that’s tomorrows problem. Now - bedtime.