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Book: The View Beyond Earth (The Archives of Varok) by Cary Neeper

categories: Book, Aliens, Soft Science Fiction, First Contact, Sustainability, Full Earth Economics, Speculative Fiction

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Cary Neeper

about this book: This book is a rewrite of A Place Beyond Man, published in 1975 by Charles Scribner's Sons and re-issued by the Author's Guild backinprint.com in the early 2000's. It is the first contact book in The Archives of Varok series, written with all the passion of the environmental movement triggered by Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb.

In 2010, when Penscript Publishing House asked to publish the entire unpublished series, revised every ten years but never marketed, I jumped at the chance. We decided that APBM needed an upgrade and a more realistic first-contact. The core issues, however, and the exploration of human identity in the face of challenging, attractive aliens, have remained the same as they were in 1975. They include the population problems that are so often ignored these days.

The goal is the same—to provide an entertaining story that stimulates thought. A long list of discussion questions for book clubs zeroes in on the critical issues that haven't gone away in these forty years. Enjoy the challenge of The View Beyond Earth.