Teaser Tuesday – 19th July, 2016

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Books and a Beat.
Anyone can play along! Just do the following:
• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

This is my choice of the day:
Solar Express by L.E. Modesitt, Jr.
p. 106: Unlike on transport flights, he was wearing a skintight pressure suit, with his helmet secured under the couch. He had his doubts about the usefulness of the suit. While it would allow him to survive decompression and would provide insulation for several hours, and oxygen for roughly the same time, its usefulness was limited to instants where damage to the burner did not affect the drives, since if he could not return somewhere quickly, he doubted that anyone could rescue him in that time – or would be terribly interested in doing so.

BLURB: You can’t militarize space. This one rule has led to decades of peaceful development of space programs worldwide. However, increasing resource scarcity and a changing climate on Earth’s surface is causing some interested parties to militarize, namely India, the North American Union, and the Sinese Federation.

The discovery of a strange artifact by Dr. Alayna Wong precipitates a crisis. What appears to be a hitherto undiscovered comet is soon revealed to be an alien structure on a cometary trajectory toward the sun. Now there is a race between countries to see who can study and control the artifact dubbed the “Solar Express” before it perhaps destroys itself.

This is hard science fiction with emphasis on the ‘hard’. Modesitt’s writing is dense, scattered with acronyms and allusions to space stuff, without stopping to explain much along the way. That’s okay. I don’t have a problem with that, so long as the protagonists are three-dimensional and believable. So far, so good – although this isn’t a book I’ll be whizzing through. Still… it’s good to let out my inner geek every so often.