Pillar to the Sky Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B00HSRDLO0 | Format: EPUB
Pillar to the Sky Description
A towering epic to rank with Douglas Preston's Blasphemy and Michael Crichton's Prey
Pandemic drought, skyrocketing oil prices, dwindling energy supplies, and wars of water scarcity threaten the planet. Only four people can prevent global chaos.
Gary Morgan - a brilliant renegade scientist pilloried by the scientific community for his belief in a space elevator: a pillar to the sky, which he believes will make space flight fast, simple, and affordable.
Eva Morgan - a brilliant and beautiful scientist of Ukranian descent, she has had a lifelong obsession to build a pillar to the sky, a vertiginous tower that would mine the power of the sun and supply humanity with cheap, limitless energy forever.
Gunther Rothenberg - the ancient but revered rocket scientist who labored at Peenem?nde with von Braun to create the first rockets and continued on to build those of today. A legend, he has mentored Gary and Eva for two decades, nurturing and encouraging their transcendent vision.
Franklin Smith - the eccentric Silicon Valley billionaire who will champion their cause, wage war with Congress and government bureaucracy, and most important, finance their herculean undertaking.
This journey to the stars will not be easy; it will be a tumultuous struggle filled with violence and heroism, love and death, spellbinding beauty and heartbreaking betrayal. The stakes could not be higher. Humanity's salvation will hang in the balance.
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 15 hours and 30 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc.
- Audible.com Release Date: February 11, 2014
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00HSRDLO0
What a hopeful and feasible vision of the future! In a world where it seems that our problems are too great to solve, this book gives a solution blueprint that is unorthodox yet makes so much sense. The guy dreams big and how long has it been since we've dreamed big and achieved amazing feats? It felt good to feel proud again of our best minds conquering long odds and realistic setbacks to move into a future that could change everything and make so many current problems obsolete.
After reading One Second After, I expected this book to be a little dark. But I was surprised and pleased to feel hope throughout and incredible optimism at the end. It is an antidote to the foreboding atmosphere that is heavy in the world right now. I looked forward to escaping to read it each night.
If you love hard science fiction, this book has plenty of realistic building materials and implementations. The author has obviously researched the topic thoroughly and knows it extremely well. I think that even NASA could use Pillar as a technical manual for how to build a space elevator.
But Pillar is not just science and facts. It weaves technology with likable, fallible characters who exhibit great heroism in a thoroughly enjoyable tale. It shows the touching relationships between a mentor and his student and between a father and his daughter. The emotions that each character invests in his goals feels so real that I found myself rooting with them and utterly disappointed when something failed.
The author's scenes are so immersive that I felt the weightlessness of zero G flight and the nausea of first time space travel. Some scenes are extremely suspenseful and incredibly vivid.
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