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| Aurora
by David A. Hardy check out website: www.cosmos-books.com and www.wildsidepress.com and www.astroart.org
Aurora is a baby girl brought in during the London Blitz of WW2 and replaces the dead baby of a mother caught in a bomb blast. She grows up and briefly becomes a stage synthesiser player before fleeing into the background again.
Despite or due to some mishaps, Aurora discovers the beacon that leads
the Martian Expedition to a downed spacecraft and discovering its secrets...which
are far more human than alien. With any first novel, someone like me is bound to be open to problem areas as much as whether the book is readable or not. Hardy definitely has his eye on the mood of the places like London or even 70s rock concerts. As he's painted Mars enough times over the years, his
knowledge here has also served some benefit and serves as a guide to the red planet.
[Incidentally, he's doing the artwork for a new non-fiction book 'Futures: 50
Years In Space' by Patrick Moore to be released next year.] If there
are any weaknesses, then it has to be with the way Aurora conveniently walks through
life without anyone else getting the wiser over the decades to her age. Even being
selected by NASA for the Mars Expedition, you'd have thought more than a cursory
look at her past, let alone her medical history, would have revealed the things
that were crucial to the finale of the book. Hardy's use of characters
are all right as far as they go but would have been helped by having a little
more friction between the various personalities during the various crisises. Then
again, I might just be too picky. After all, if you were going to Mars you wouldn't
want a bickering team or you'd be driven nuts after a week. Still,
it's an encouraging read and no doubt David Hardy will learn from this novel and
bring this knowledge to his second book. GF Willmetts
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OTHER REVIEWS - November 2003
Told By The Dead by Ramsay Campbell The Sandman: Endless Nights by Neil Gaiman Robota by Doug Chaing and Orson Scott Card Grass For His Pillow by Lian Hearn Darker Than You Think by Jack Williamson The World Jones Made by Philip K. Dick All My Sins Remembered by Joe Haldeman Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion by Larry Nemecek The Year's Best Fantasy And Horror The Binder's Road by Terry McGarry Project Orion - The Atomic Spaceship by George Dyson The Word And The Void by Terry Brooks Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine April/May 2003 Time Out Of Joint by Philip K. Dick Buffy the Vampire Slayer Soundtrack Smallville Soundtrack (The Talon Mix) Damnation Alley by Roger Zelazny Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days by Alastair Reynolds Crossroads Of Twilight by Robert Jordan Mediations On Middle-Earth by Karen Haber and John Howe
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Yep!
It's the same David Hardy. The artist chap who was the subject of
Paper Tiger's 'Hardyware' reviewed two years ago. 'Aurora' is his
debut novel and as he has commented on the cover, is the kind of
Science Fiction he would buy if he saw it around.
Finding
herself ageing very slowly, she regularly moves and changes her identity, getting
qualified enough along the way to become part of the first manned flight to Mars.
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