Picked up at The Book Thing of Baltimore. www.bookthing.org

Adding to the Sci-Fi box. Thanks for hosting!

Taking from Erishkigal's sci-fi bookbox. Thanks!

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I found that I had read this one before so making it available.

Amazon Editorial Review

In the year 2110 technology has cured most of our worries. But even as humankind enters a new golden age, an amateur astronomer points his telescope at just the right corner of the night sky and sees disaster hurtling toward Earth: a chunk of rock that could annihilate civilization. While a few fanatics welcome the apocalyptic destruction as a sign from God, the greatest scientific minds of Earth desperately search for a way to avoid the inevitable. On board the starship Goliath Captain Robert Singh and his crew must race against time to redirect the meteor form its deadly collision course. Suddenly they find themselves on the most important mission in human history--a mission whose success may require the ultimate sacrifice.

Adding this one to the Otherworldly bookbox.

I'm claiming this from the Otherworldly bookbox. I love end-of-the-world books, and somehow I hadn't read this one before.

Later: I enjoyed this book, from its poignant opening flashback/memory to the ups and downs of the discovery of the Earth-threatening asteroid Kali, with the side notes sketching the changes to society since the colonization of Mars. [The fact that humankind is already establishing colonies on other planets makes the potential destruction of Earth slightly less plot-critical, though of course the Martian settlers and the many occupants of moon bases and spacecraft don't want to see their home world destroyed. It just wouldn't mean the wiping out of mankind as a whole.]

Little touches, such as the bald-is-beautiful fashion shift due to the prevalence of the Brainman VR headgear, and the references to the way long-term low-gravity life renders people unable to maneuver on Earth (unless they've been doing regular exercises, or make use of a mobile exoskeleton), add to the "this is the future" feel, without being too heavy-handed. [Among my favorite items - the creation of house-cat-sized tigers as pets; I want a "Tigrette" of my own {wry grin}.] We get to know the key characters pretty well, and can empathize with them even with their extended lifespans and other cultural changes.

Among the more unexpected changes: the major religions seem to have not only surmounted their differences but merged into one (though there are still splinter groups around). As nice as it would be to see a relaxation of extremist views, I'm not quite sure I buy the model that's shown here; still, I appreciated the background info - and the effect it had on the characters.

The attempts to deal with Kali range from the well-planned ones to the increasingly improvised ones needed as various factors interfere, and things get very, very tense. A lot of these plot swerves resemble those used in many death-from-above books and films, but I liked the way Clarke dealt with them. (One note I hadn't seen in any other version of this story: at a point when a decision had to be made whether to detonate a device that might prevent Kali from impacting Earth but could also result in a shower of lesser but still disastrous impacts, the question is put up to a global referendum. Imagine putting that kind of question up for "like/don't like" votes today?)

I also enjoyed the extensive sources-and-acknowledgements afterword, in which Clarke explained where his ideas came from.

I left this book in the Book Swap Hut at the Amherst Transfer Station at around 4; hope the finder enjoys it!