Solar Express

With this audiobook, listeners will enjoy the long-distance love story as much as the technically savvy science fiction. Narrator Robert Fass takes a steady, deliberate approach in delivering the events that ensue when an apparently indestructible (but damaged) alien artifact dives like a comet towards the sun. His friendly, American, middle-range voice offers slight but recognizable differentiation between the characters. As newscasts are interspersed throughout the chapters, Fass treats them like any other text. Earth's governments are in their usual uproar, and the militarization of space is a real possibility. The subplots have been done before, but here the science is current, with an extrapolation or two. But people are still people, and aliens are . . . something else, evidently. Or--are they? D.R.W. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine

September 21, 2015
Alayna Wong-Grant, lone astrophysicist at a telescopic array on the dark side of the Moon, spots an object moving in a cometary orbit but with unnatural properties, including high reflectivity and traces of silver. Capt. Chris Tavoian, a Moon-based military pilot and Alayna’s pen pal, volunteers for a hazardous mission to pilot a short-range spacecraft to the object. The object initially gets the unlikely official classification of asteroid, but as it gets closer to the sun—and speeds up, hence being named Solar Express—Alayna and Chris realize it is something much stranger. They need to join forces to figure out its secrets and keep Chris alive on his mission. Modesitt, better known for his epic fantasy (the Saga of Recluce), approaches the story slowly and methodically, revealing only tiny pieces at a time. The Solar Express itself is less interesting than Alayna and Chris’s letters to each other and their back-and-forth over the object, but there’s sufficient mystery and plenty of solid science.