When Jack Harrison climbed down the short ladder from the airlock and stepped onto the debris covered soil, the ground crackled with the sound of dried leaves and twigs. Warm sunlight shined through his helmet, making him almost forget the decade he just spent captaining Earth’s first ship to another star system. The serene tropical surroundings, though, stood in stark contrast to the long abandoned structures that lay nearby.
Evidence points to a massacre – the systematic extermination of an alien colony hundreds of millennia ahead of humanity. Time, however, has erased any trace of the attackers. Jack and his crew barely start probing the ruins before their curiosity betrays them as an abandoned alien device cuts them off from their main ship. Lost and short on supplies, survival soon becomes their only goal. Even their short-lived rescue by an alien race, who themselves are under siege, offers little hope. As they struggle to find a way home, signs begin pointing to a danger darker than any they could have foreseen. Jack knows that playing it safe may no longer be an option – but his only other choice is to confront a threat that they don’t even begin to understand.
“We’ve got to consider all possible scenarios,” Jack says early on, during one of many thorough, speculative discussions. Author Karpf, an experimental physicist, shares that impulse, and fans of thoughtful, science-minded hard SF will relish this in-depth consideration of every parameter of a potential first-contact scenario—and a host of other big ideas, too. The mysteries entice, and the answers don’t disappoint, though the target audience for this long (and at times exhaustively detailed) novel is not readers who prefer swift-paced action. Prelude to Extinction introduces an author eager to show the work behind SF wonders
Those mysteries—and the crew’s surprising trips to further-flung realms of space-time—prove rich enough that it would be churlish to reveal more of the plot. What sets this engrossing odyssey apart is Karpf’s careful attention to tech, science, and philosophy, from the time-bending complexity of interstellar flight, to myriad logistics, to the hard choices Jack faces involving the dead planet and wormholes, to how to send a simple, intelligible message back to Earth. Readers eager to immerse themselves in all that—and to have the SF science check out—will find this mission irresistible.
Takeaway: A crew explores a seemingly dead planet for intelligent life in this smart hard SF epic.
Great for fans of: Alastair Reynolds’s Pushing Ice, Frederik Pohl’s Gateway.
Production grades
Cover: B+
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: B+
Marketing copy: A
