Across a Billion Years

In russian translation this term was not translated and left as is in english. I was trying many times to get the meaning by googling but not luck yet. So if someone could explain what does this mean, I would appreciate. Did you think about choosing the most recommended Bitcoin exchange service - YoBit.

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Although paralysed and permanently confined to a hospital bed, she is telepathically hooked into the galactic network of telepaths that provides the only instantaneous communication grid between star systems. As Tom explains to her, his vocation is all about finding what is hidden. No-one knows where they came from, or what became of them.

The party is made up of a deliberately comic collection of the diverse races encountered and linked into a more-or-less friendly community alongside the expanding human presence. Some species are relatively older, some younger, but none have histories stretching as far back as the time of the High Ones.

Merrik from Dinamon IX is a cross between a bulldozer and a blue-tusked rhinoceros, he recites love poetry and gets euphorically drunk on pollen. Pilazinool of Shilamak is a Borg-type man-machine who spends a lot of time polishing his artificial implants. He worries about getting grit in his gears, and at times of stress he unscrews his limbs into a pile. Tom also mentions in passing that Cairo, Syria and Baghdad are all part of Israel! It will change, if not necessarily in this way, then in some similarly unexpected unpredictable directions.

So this playful invention stands in for such changes. He is part of a team from Earth, venturing out in search of artifacts from a civilization that ruled the universe many millennia ago. Called the High Ones, the members of this long-gone society left tantalizing clues about their history and culture scattered throughout space.

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A Man of His Word. The Temple and the Stone. Children of the Comet. The Face in the Frost. A Choice of Treasons. There Is No Darkness. The Five Senses Set. The Hunt for Vulcan. A Boy and His Dog. Islands in the Net. The Long List Anthology. The Spellsinger Adventures Volume One. From this more or less young "everyman's" perspective we see the expedition uncover a series of finds that bring the long lost alien's closer to our own time. Here Silverberg excels with the sense of wonder and excitement until we come face to face with working technology of the High Ones.

But no discovery is without cost and a deadly one is extracted. Further discoveries abound until we stand on the edge of a new future that could imperil everything from the past and we learn that those we had looked on as near Gods, may have had feet of clay. Across a Billion Years is an enjoyable read, perhaps a tad dated.

Across a Billion Years

There are areas you longed to see explored more, the artificial human female, Kelly occupies less of the book than I would have liked. We encounter AIs that seem to have some emotionality but that is also not explored. Still, there are only so many pages in a book and you have to choose characters and plot lines to follow and others to regretfully let slip by.

I suppose the best thing you can say there is that you wanted more time with some of the characters and the milieu at the end of the book. Tom Rice may not start as someone you would necessarily seek out as a friend, but he ends as a young man you would be proud to know Nov 27, Ron rated it really liked it Shelves: It flunks sociology, as do many contemporaries. The first one is find your evidence. Silverberg invented believable slang, acknowledging that languages evolve in four hundred years. Androids are an emancipated minority.

It is the end of secrecy and suspicion, of misunderstanding, of quarrels, of isolation, of flawed communication, of separation. Not so long as humans have greed and pride, not to mention psychopaths. In fact, those of us who control those impulses would be exposed without the mitigating factor of our choosing to behave better Those who control those impulses would be censored regardless of the mitigating factor of their behavior. Apr 18, Chip rated it liked it. Typical of your s juvenile book. A good amount of action considering the book is about a group of archaeologists.

Delivery is a bit distracting since it takes the form of a really long dictated letter from fraternal twin brother to sister. Science is really soft and dated but the point of the story is the entertainment value. Jan 08, Robert Gelms rated it it was amazing. He is a sci-fi writer extraordinaire. It was out of print for a while but re-released last year in paperback. He is a very prolific writer and I read a lot of his stuff when I was a boy. If you are a fan of sci-fi you undoubtedly have heard his name and quite likely read some of his stuff.

That never ceases to amaze me, how he is not a household name. Silverberg wrote during the golden age of sci-fi. He is in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. He was voted into a very small, very exclusive group of writers when he was given the title of Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America in There are only 33 writers who have that distinction.

He is in the company of Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Robert A.

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Silverberg has won the Nebula five times. His influence on the genre is incalculable. What it does have is a mystery surrounding the most momentous discovery in the history of Earth. It takes place years in the future but concerns itself with the ancient past on Earth.

A group of space archeologists make a dazzling discovery about an alien race that lived on Earth and apparently ruled the galaxy a billion years ago.

Review: Across A Billion Years | Bob on Books

They left beguiling artifacts on Earth and elsewhere in the galaxy. Tagging along on his first off-world expedition is graduate student, Tom Rice. The team members are a rag tag bunch of different species, some with very strange characteristics, none more so than an artificial intelligence android. They come upon a cube that Tom figures out is some kind of recording device. When he finally is able to decipher parts of the message, it turns out the High Ones might not be extinct after all.

They then embark on a mission many light years away in search of the High Ones.

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The five humans, the five other alien crew members and the android have some trouble getting along. Bigotry rears its ugly head but they get it under control for the sake of the mission. The story is told in the first person by Tom who is recording letters for his sister back on Earth. Silverberg does create interesting elements attached to the High Ones that will keep your attention all the way till the last page. This is more of a heady piece but never gets boring. Some of the archeological techniques are dated and so is some of the science when reading it today but back in this was state of the art.

Apr 02, Greg Tymn rated it it was ok. When I first received an email for an inexpensive "new" novel by Silverberg, I thought: It would read something to the effect that: The price of an e-book is inversely proportional to the square of the years since original copywright. I should have known that this Silverberg novel was from And it certainly isn't Ringworld. It's an ordinary sci-fi novel from the period.

Still, I bought it and, since Silverberg is generally a good author, I plodded through it. Written in the first person with the mores and cultural "insensitivity" that even the most liberal men had at that time, the novel contains sci-fi nuggets that are easily picked out of the more prosaic sections of the diary, allowing for comparison with the possible futures we envision in the novels written in the 21st century.

The science concepts have held up reasonably well but with less detail than today's readers might otherwise demand. Large sections of the novel are "chatty", which I despise. But, a civilization that's a billion years old? There were enough hooks to keep me skipping pages and extracting essence. I can't say that it was really worth the money or the time. If given the choice of the novel or a McDonald's Filet of Fish Jul 23, Safat rated it it was amazing Shelves: The imaginative scale of this book boogles my mind. Which is what we expect from any good science fiction.

A group of space archaeologists from different planets make a discovery that puts them on the trail of an ancient, highly advanced race that disappeared nearly a billion years ago. Tom Rice is a graduate archaeology researcher part of a team drawn from several different races from different planets on an expedition excavating a site on one of the planets occupied by an incredibly advanced and ancient civilization, The High Ones. Tom, in his youthful enthusiasm, is the narrator of this st Summary: Tom, in his youthful enthusiasm, is the narrator of this story.

The chapters are recorded messages to his telepath sister, Lorie, whose mind can communicate across the galaxy while her invalid body is confined to a hospital bed. The dig, like most, is tediously routine at first, allowing us to get to know the expedition's characters--the android Kelly, the rhino-like Mirrick, Dr. Horkk from Thhh, Steen Steen, a hermaphroditic creature, Saul the stamp collector, Leroy Chang, who turns out to be kind of creepy, Pilazinool, who loves to remove and replace his robotic limbs, Dr Shein, who heads the expedition, b, an octopoid creature, and Tom's love interest, Jan, who at first is more interested in the stamp collector.

The expedition shifts from tedium to intrigue when Tom discovers a sphere that is kind of a projector, that plays back scenes from The High One's civilization. Nothing like this has ever been discovered. More than that, it puts them on a trail of discovery leading first to an asteroid where a robot has been entombed in a cave, it turns out over years ago. They find the asteroid, and the robot intact, who conveniently is a universal translator. The robot in turn takes them to a home planet, abandoned "just" million year ago by the Mirt Korp Ahm, as the High Ones call themselves. The planet continues to be inhabited by a fantastic assemblage of self-maintaining robots, much like Dihn Ruu, their interpreter.