Claire McCague
Forfatter af The Rosetta Man
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Image credit: Claire McCague
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- Køn
- female
- Nationalitet
- Canada
- Kort biografi
- Claire McCague is a writer, scientist, and folk musician who fabricates nanostructured materials by day and spins words into scripts and books as the stars rise. She lives and doesn’t sleep much in British Columbia.
Claire McCague has spent time playing with focused electron beams, femtosecond laser beams, neutron beams and plain, old x-rays. She has a doctorate in chemistry, achieved explicitly to support her arts habits, and spends her days trying to save the world through development of nanostructured materials for sustainable energy conversion systems. Claire performs regularly with the Sybaritic String Band and her plays have been featured in festivals across Canada.
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- Værker
- 2
- Medlemmer
- 78
- Popularitet
- #229,022
- Vurdering
- 3.5
- Anmeldelser
- 35
- ISBN
- 2
This is a fast paced story with many strands and lots of characters, which I sometimes have difficulty with. The central part of the story is so intriguing, so well written, and so vivid, that I forgave myself when I got lost with the complexities and just carried on regardless. I suspect a re-reading would be beneficial and I’d enjoy it even more. Most of my confusions are down to being unfamiliar with the pet names for various types of military hardware, and I was more at home with the vagaries of the swarms of animals that helped track Estlin (our hero) across the Pacific. I mean, can you imagine it – message from the coastguard: I don’t know what’s going on, but we’ve got ten thousand rabbits crowding the cliffs looking out to sea. Add bats, cuttlefish and Russian squirrels with tracking devices… Yes, I suppose light-hearted does come into it, but it’s hell for Estlin.
At the heart of it all is the fact that he, almost alone in the world, can communicate with the aliens that selected New Zealand as their place to make the world aware of their existence. There’s some serious maths involved in the description of how they got here, a theme that wends in and out of the narrative, helping to prove that Estlin really is communicating and not making it all up.
By the time I finished, I wished I’d read Ms McCague’s bio, or I’d have realised I could be out of my depth earlier. Daytime job, nanotechnology. If I don’t keep my insecure writer head on, I am going to be seriously dissuaded from doing scifi books, since my science knowledge is stuck around 2000. Either that or I’ll have to check out some new grad-school science books. But no, I can go with what I know and can invent, just as Ms McCague does. But it’s brilliantly written, with fabulous descriptions of the communication methodology, and overall, seriously good.
With aliens.
Set partly on Samoa.
With a man who talks to animals, rather than people.
What’s not to like?
… (mere)