I've read this book before, and after I finish The Eternal Tide I'm planning on going back to re-read this book again. But what do you think of this book?
I think it's one of the best VGR novels published during the series, and a strong showcase for Chakotay. A lot of people complain about Christie Golden's post-finale novels, but I think it tends to be forgotten that the reason Golden got that assignment was because her novels set during the series were generally the most highly regarded ones. The Murdered Sun and Marooned are probably her best, though I think Seven of Nine is very good too (it covers similar ground to the later episode "Infinite Regress," but handles it better). My one problem with The Murdered Sun is that there's a pretty big science error at the core of it: removing mass from a star would actually prolong its life, not shorten it, because it would reduce the pressure and temperature in the core and slow the rate of fusion.
^ Wouldn't we have to do some sort of calculation here? Removing mass from a star would reduce the rate of fusion, but there would also be fewer atoms left to undergo fusion.
Dang, I haven't read this since it was published so I don't recal it all that well but I remember that I enjoyed it.
It doesn't work that way. In the real world, lower-mass stars have substantially longer lifespans than higher-mass ones, in many cases by several orders of magnitude. Sol has another five billion years to go before it becomes a white dwarf, to name a single example, while Proxima Centauri or Barnard's Star can probably count on running another trillion years. I never read The Murdered Sun. What mechanism did they identify for the star's transformation?
My answer exactly - I remember reading it on a flight to Vienna actually, and that I liked it, but don't remember anything about it
No, because fusion only happens in the core, and it's the outer atmosphere that's being removed. See, it's all about weight and pressure. Fusion happens when hydrogen nuclei are compressed tightly enough and heated up enough that they can slam together with enough force to overcome their mutual repulsion. The hydrogen in the core of a star is compressed that much because of the huge amount of other hydrogen that's pressing down on it from above. The more massive a star is, the more weight there is pressing down on the core, compressing it even more so that even more atoms are able to fuse together. So the outer portion of the star isn't involved in the fusion reaction; it's only dead weight. It glows because of incandescence, because the fusion reaction deep inside the star is heating the rest of the star to a high enough temperature to glow like a light bulb filament. In nature, the smaller a star is, the longer it lives. Huge supergiant stars die after only a few million years or even a few hundred thousand if they're huge enough, because the fusion in their cores is so intense. But small red dwarf have life expectancies in the trillions of years; to all intents and purposes, they're immortal. Not to mention that stars naturally lose mass all the time, expelling it in the solar wind or ejecting it in flares. So it's not like there's some delicate balance being maintained and the star will die if any mass is removed. (Sorry, Stargate fans, the episode where Carter blew up a star by sucking some of its atmosphere into a Stargate was complete and utter BS.) There is, in fact, a theoretical process called "star lifting" that entails drawing material off of a star's atmosphere in order to prolong its life (as well as allowing the material to be used for megascale engineering projects).
I'd say it's the best VOY book I've read. It only gets a Good from me, but then that isn't my favorite series
When I first read the book back during the summer of 98 (that was between Grade 8 and 9) I remember that the science stuff was what really bogged the book down for me, even though it was a good story. But, considering my age at the time, I'll probably get a lot more enjoyment out of the book now that I'm through High School.
(FYI, it'd have been really nice if you had made the poll follow the standard option and title format so it would be picked up here.)
^ It's mostly about the poll options (the title could be changed); in order for the comparison to make sense they have to be the same (I did make an exception for 2-3 threads that used "Excellent" instead of "Outstanding", seemed close enough).
I'm up to about page 150 (part way through chapter 11 or 12, I'm no too sure), but I'm just thinking back to the previous discussions surrounding "The Eternal Tide", and how Janeway always seemed too get the lions share of the 'A' plots. Well in "The Murdered Sun" I'm finding that it is Chakotay who has the 'A' plot, while Janeway and Paris (who are both featured on the cover with Voyager, but no Chakotay) have their own 'B' plots (Torres shows up a little bit, and then aside from th start of the novel, Neelix, Kes and the Doctor aren't even in the book past page 45 or 50). Anyway, real good story, and if you felt a little let down, you should read this Voyager classic. Oh, Chakotay's 'A' plot has similarities to the episode "Tattoo", but the similarities are with his Native American beliefs, and not much past that.
Just finished the book---I enjoyed it more than "The Eternal Tide". And considering when the book was published (February 1996), Christie Golden managed too handle the characters extremely well, although I get the sense that she didn't quite know how too handle the Doctor---her take on him kind of reminded me of how the Doctor was handled in "Elite Force" whenever you just strolled into sickbay.
^The Doctor is perhaps the character who evolved the most from what was originally conceived, thanks to all that Picardo brought to the role and inspired in the writers. The first several novels were written before the show actually premiered, so the novelists wouldn't have had the benefit of Picardo's performance to work from. (A number of the early novels call him "Doc Zimmerman," since the original idea in the series bible was that he'd eventually adopt the name of his creator.)
Actually, I've been reading the the Voyager novels from #1 over the past two years, and the only book where the Doctor is called Zimmerman is in #4 "Violations". There have been mentions of the Doctor's creator but that's where the rest of the Zimmerman mentions come from, and those have been scarce.
A Google Books search confirms that the Doctor was also referred to as "Doc Zimmerman" multiple times in The Escape. Okay, so that's technically "a number of early novels," but the number is only two, so I overstated it a bit.