"Inherit the Stars" by James P. Hogan (1977)

Ok, let's look at something a little less off-the-wall, and a little more traditional "hard" SF. The fact that this book does the whole space mystery and sense of wonder thing significantly better than most of the genre leaves me truly mystified as to why this book isn't better known. "Pure science fiction...Arthur Clarke move over!" says Isaac Asimov on the cover. Now, Asimov probably just wanted Clarke to move over in general, but that's still quite an endorsement! And yet, while Clarke's more popular books have hundreds of thousands of GoodReads ratings, "Inherit the Stars" has all of five thousand and change.

This makes no sense. Let's start with the premise: In the near future (2027 to be specific, so we'd better hurry up!) moon explorers discover a humanoid skeleton in a space suit. Further analysis reveals that the corpse is 50,000 years old, meaning that it can't be of human origin. As my kids like to say: Dun-dun-DUUUNNN! Come on, that's a hell of a start.

Now, throw on top of that the fact that Hogan has a fast-paced summer bestseller writing style reminiscent of Michael Crichton, and balances hard science with wild cosmological speculation and big ideas. And throw in one of Darrell K. Sweet's all-time best space opera covers (not even Heinlein got any quite this good), and you've got pure SF gold!

So, why isn't this book wildly popular? Hell if I know. People are weird. All I can say is read this book, demand a Netflix series, write to your Senator. What? No, I don't know what you should say to your Senator, you figure it out! Do I have to do everything around here?

Maybe the one thing the story has going against it is that there's no real conflict, and no baddies. It's a book that occupies itself with a big mystery and the people who are determined to solve it. Sometimes they argue about it a bit, so there's that. Lack of conflict can often lead to a boring story, but that's so not the case here that it's unlikely you'll even notice.

This book became a trilogy over the next few years, and eventually picked up a couple more, as trilogies tend to do in this field. But it works well enough as a standalone that I'm ashamed to say I haven't gotten to the following books yet. I hope to rectify this unfortunate situation in the near future.

A note about the author: Hogan was an outspoken skeptic of scientific consensus views. He wrote a nonfiction book entitled "Kicking the Sacred Cow: Heresy and Impermissible Thoughts in Science" (2004). In his later years, he adopted a number of controversial opinions regarding science and history. If you prefer not to read problematic authors, you can look into his controversies. If you prefer to separate the art from the artist, which has mostly been my personal approach so far (as I'll discuss in a future post of an L. Ron Hubbard book), then I don't think you'll find anything troubling in "Inherit the Stars" itself.

Read this one if: You need to know why in the hell there was the skeleton of some kind of ancient alien just lying around on the moon like it was no big deal

Consider skipping if: A big scientific space mystery with no real conflict or bad guys isn't your thing

Inherit the Stars (There seem to be no ebook versions so I'll link to audio/paper listings as available. Or check your local used bookshop):

Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon Canada, Barnes and Noble