What do you think?
Rate this book
Giants #1
Das Erbe der Sterne
Ein toter Raumfahrer
In einer felsigen Höhle auf dem Mond wird eine Leiche in einem roten Raumanzug entdeckt. Niemand weiß, wer der Mann ist. Niemand weiß, woher er kam. Niemand weiß, wer oder was ihn umgebracht haben könnte. Als Wissenschaftler die Leiche daraufhin genauer untersuchen, stellen sie fest, dass der verblichene Raumfahrer 50.000 Jahre alt ist. Er wurde also zu einer Zeit geboren, als es weder die Raumfahrt noch menschliches Leben auf der Erde gab. Es ist das größte Rätsel in der Geschichte des Universums...
In einer felsigen Höhle auf dem Mond wird eine Leiche in einem roten Raumanzug entdeckt. Niemand weiß, wer der Mann ist. Niemand weiß, woher er kam. Niemand weiß, wer oder was ihn umgebracht haben könnte. Als Wissenschaftler die Leiche daraufhin genauer untersuchen, stellen sie fest, dass der verblichene Raumfahrer 50.000 Jahre alt ist. Er wurde also zu einer Zeit geboren, als es weder die Raumfahrt noch menschliches Leben auf der Erde gab. Es ist das größte Rätsel in der Geschichte des Universums...
352 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published May 1, 1977
114 people are currently reading
7380 people want to read
About the author
James P. Hogan
115 books271 followersJames Patrick Hogan was a British science fiction author.
Hogan was was raised in the Portobello Road area on the west side of London. After leaving school at the age of sixteen, he worked various odd jobs until, after receiving a scholarship, he began a five-year program at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough covering the practical and theoretical sides of electrical, electronic, and mechanical engineering. He first married at the age of twenty, and he has had three other subsequent marriages and fathered six children.
Hogan worked as a design engineer for several companies and eventually moved into sales in the 1960s, travelling around Europe as a sales engineer for Honeywell. In the 1970s he joined the Digital Equipment Corporation's Laboratory Data Processing Group and in 1977 moved to Boston, Massachusetts to run its sales training program. He published his first novel, Inherit the Stars, in the same year to win an office bet. He quit DEC in 1979 and began writing full time, moving to Orlando, Florida, for a year where he met his third wife Jackie. They then moved to Sonora, California.
Hogan's style of science fiction is usually hard science fiction. In his earlier works he conveyed a sense of what science and scientists were about. His philosophical view on how science should be done comes through in many of his novels; theories should be formulated based on empirical research, not the other way around. If a theory does not match the facts, it is theory that should be discarded, not the facts. This is very evident in the Giants series, which begins with the discovery of a 50,000 year-old human body on the Moon. This discovery leads to a series of investigations, and as facts are discovered, theories on how the astronaut's body arrived on the Moon 50,000 years ago are elaborated, discarded, and replaced.
Hogan's fiction also reflects anti-authoritarian social views. Many of his novels have strong anarchist or libertarian themes, often promoting the idea that new technological advances render certain social conventions obsolete. For example, the effectively limitless availability of energy that would result from the development of controlled nuclear fusion would make it unnecessary to limit access to energy resources. In essence, energy would become free. This melding of scientific and social speculation is clearly present in the novel Voyage from Yesteryear (strongly influenced by Eric Frank Russell's famous story "And Then There Were None"), which describes the contact between a high-tech anarchist society on a planet in the Alpha Centauri system, with a starship sent from Earth by a dictatorial government. The story uses many elements of civil disobedience.
James Hogan died unexpectedly from a heart attack at his home in Ireland.
Hogan was was raised in the Portobello Road area on the west side of London. After leaving school at the age of sixteen, he worked various odd jobs until, after receiving a scholarship, he began a five-year program at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough covering the practical and theoretical sides of electrical, electronic, and mechanical engineering. He first married at the age of twenty, and he has had three other subsequent marriages and fathered six children.
Hogan worked as a design engineer for several companies and eventually moved into sales in the 1960s, travelling around Europe as a sales engineer for Honeywell. In the 1970s he joined the Digital Equipment Corporation's Laboratory Data Processing Group and in 1977 moved to Boston, Massachusetts to run its sales training program. He published his first novel, Inherit the Stars, in the same year to win an office bet. He quit DEC in 1979 and began writing full time, moving to Orlando, Florida, for a year where he met his third wife Jackie. They then moved to Sonora, California.
Hogan's style of science fiction is usually hard science fiction. In his earlier works he conveyed a sense of what science and scientists were about. His philosophical view on how science should be done comes through in many of his novels; theories should be formulated based on empirical research, not the other way around. If a theory does not match the facts, it is theory that should be discarded, not the facts. This is very evident in the Giants series, which begins with the discovery of a 50,000 year-old human body on the Moon. This discovery leads to a series of investigations, and as facts are discovered, theories on how the astronaut's body arrived on the Moon 50,000 years ago are elaborated, discarded, and replaced.
Hogan's fiction also reflects anti-authoritarian social views. Many of his novels have strong anarchist or libertarian themes, often promoting the idea that new technological advances render certain social conventions obsolete. For example, the effectively limitless availability of energy that would result from the development of controlled nuclear fusion would make it unnecessary to limit access to energy resources. In essence, energy would become free. This melding of scientific and social speculation is clearly present in the novel Voyage from Yesteryear (strongly influenced by Eric Frank Russell's famous story "And Then There Were None"), which describes the contact between a high-tech anarchist society on a planet in the Alpha Centauri system, with a starship sent from Earth by a dictatorial government. The story uses many elements of civil disobedience.
James Hogan died unexpectedly from a heart attack at his home in Ireland.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 608 reviews
April 24, 2024
A puzzle-box, matryoshka doll detective story starting with the discovery of what seems to be impossibly old human remains on the Moon. Enjoyable if you like the cyclical pattern of Mystery -> Investigation -> Discovery -> "But wait! There's more!" I was expecting another engineer to jump out of the bushes in the epilogue yelling, "But, what about this thing you obviously overlooked?!"
Overall, a specific kind of fun if you like Arthur C. Clarke-ian engineers bantering ideas and theories back and forth. First Hogan and my first impression - He enjoys throwing an extra scoop of Science! into his fiction.
Overall, a specific kind of fun if you like Arthur C. Clarke-ian engineers bantering ideas and theories back and forth. First Hogan and my first impression - He enjoys throwing an extra scoop of Science! into his fiction.
May 9, 2024
Apparently 2001: A Space Odyssey was the inspiration for this novel.
It’s interesting to note the parallels. Both works foresaw a future that, more or less, has now come to pass (this story takes place roughly between 2027 and 2029). And in both instances, the reality is very different than what the authors hoped for. One could argue that they were overly optimistic, but given when these books were published (the 1960s and 1970s respectively), both proffer great examples of addressing the “What If?” question, as well as a “What Could Have Been” scenario.
Inherit The Stars came highly, highly recommended. It does, however, take a while to start yielding its secrets, being one of those novels where the reward is really reaped in persevering right to the end. Did I find it worth it? Hell, yes.
But before long, men would turn their prow toward the open gulf and plunge into the voids between the galaxies. There would be no Sun to reassure them then, and there would be no stars at all; the galaxies themselves would be just faint spots, scattered all the way to infinity. What strange new continents were waiting on the other side of those gulfs?
Anachronisms aside (we have to make allowances, both the scientific and socio-economic landscapes have changed since this was written), this is a deep dive into scientific detail pertaining to everything from linguistics, mathematics, astronomy, evolutionary biology (etc, etc.).
In the future Hogan envisioned, mankind has more-or-less conquered the solar system. The main plot is driven by the discovery of a 50,000 year old human body on the Moon. This sets off a large scale investigation, bringing together a number of scientific disciplines, to try and solve the mystery of origin.
He gazed deep into the heart of the Andromeda Galaxy, and out at distant specks on the very threshold of detection. Scientists and physicists described the strange new picture of the Cosmos that was beginning to emerge from their work here and explained some of the exciting advances in concepts of space-time mechanics, which indicated that feasible methods could be devised for deforming astronomic geodesics in such a way that the limitations once thought to apply to extreme effective velocities could be avoided. If so, interstellar travel would become a practical proposition; one of the scientists confidently predicted that man would cross the Galaxy within fifty years.
The novel often reads like a forensic mystery of sorts, and there is a lot of depiction of Scientific debate. Rather than dry, I found it mostly compelling.
To keep things interesting, a secondary discovery is introduced halfway through the novel. This time, an ancient spaceship on Ganymede, dated at millions of years old. Are these discoveries related? And how?
He thought of the time that had passed since those events had taken place—of the empires that had grown and fallen, the cities that had crumbled to dust, and the lives that had sparkled briefly and been swallowed into the past—while all that time, unchanging, the secret of these rocks had lain undisturbed.
This one is recommended for Hard SF buffs, and for SF completists.
It’s interesting to note the parallels. Both works foresaw a future that, more or less, has now come to pass (this story takes place roughly between 2027 and 2029). And in both instances, the reality is very different than what the authors hoped for. One could argue that they were overly optimistic, but given when these books were published (the 1960s and 1970s respectively), both proffer great examples of addressing the “What If?” question, as well as a “What Could Have Been” scenario.
Inherit The Stars came highly, highly recommended. It does, however, take a while to start yielding its secrets, being one of those novels where the reward is really reaped in persevering right to the end. Did I find it worth it? Hell, yes.
But before long, men would turn their prow toward the open gulf and plunge into the voids between the galaxies. There would be no Sun to reassure them then, and there would be no stars at all; the galaxies themselves would be just faint spots, scattered all the way to infinity. What strange new continents were waiting on the other side of those gulfs?
Anachronisms aside (we have to make allowances, both the scientific and socio-economic landscapes have changed since this was written), this is a deep dive into scientific detail pertaining to everything from linguistics, mathematics, astronomy, evolutionary biology (etc, etc.).
In the future Hogan envisioned, mankind has more-or-less conquered the solar system. The main plot is driven by the discovery of a 50,000 year old human body on the Moon. This sets off a large scale investigation, bringing together a number of scientific disciplines, to try and solve the mystery of origin.
He gazed deep into the heart of the Andromeda Galaxy, and out at distant specks on the very threshold of detection. Scientists and physicists described the strange new picture of the Cosmos that was beginning to emerge from their work here and explained some of the exciting advances in concepts of space-time mechanics, which indicated that feasible methods could be devised for deforming astronomic geodesics in such a way that the limitations once thought to apply to extreme effective velocities could be avoided. If so, interstellar travel would become a practical proposition; one of the scientists confidently predicted that man would cross the Galaxy within fifty years.
The novel often reads like a forensic mystery of sorts, and there is a lot of depiction of Scientific debate. Rather than dry, I found it mostly compelling.
To keep things interesting, a secondary discovery is introduced halfway through the novel. This time, an ancient spaceship on Ganymede, dated at millions of years old. Are these discoveries related? And how?
He thought of the time that had passed since those events had taken place—of the empires that had grown and fallen, the cities that had crumbled to dust, and the lives that had sparkled briefly and been swallowed into the past—while all that time, unchanging, the secret of these rocks had lain undisturbed.
This one is recommended for Hard SF buffs, and for SF completists.
October 31, 2015
Hard science fiction folks...you'll love this. The book takes it's time setting up the story (read introduces some of the characters, wanders around giving us a short intro to the book...and so on.) First we get a small snippet of "what went before" and then we start to meet the people involved.
After you've well read the opening, heard about "the scope" and met some of these people (and yawned a good deal) we finally find, Charlie. Now Charlie is a dead spaceman/astronaut found on the moon in a bright red space suit.
Who died 50,000 years ago...
Yeah that hooked me to. Too bad the story-telling doesn't live up to the idea. (Though I know some of you will GREATLY disagree with me as people do love this book).
The story basically boils down to an imaginary chain of research accounts and debates showing attitudes of the people making the arguments (closed minded to open minded). It finally does boil down to a possible answer...though I was pretty tired of it all by that time.
There is one thing I think may be an anomaly or even an error here. Please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. "Charlie" is found not only dead but decayed in his space suit. Wouldn't the freezing temp on the moon (he was in a sort of depression or under cover) have prevented that???
Oh well.
Not one I really got into, found the arguments a bit boring after a while. See what you think. Mediocre for me.
After you've well read the opening, heard about "the scope" and met some of these people (and yawned a good deal) we finally find, Charlie. Now Charlie is a dead spaceman/astronaut found on the moon in a bright red space suit.
Who died 50,000 years ago...
Yeah that hooked me to. Too bad the story-telling doesn't live up to the idea. (Though I know some of you will GREATLY disagree with me as people do love this book).
The story basically boils down to an imaginary chain of research accounts and debates showing attitudes of the people making the arguments (closed minded to open minded). It finally does boil down to a possible answer...though I was pretty tired of it all by that time.
There is one thing I think may be an anomaly or even an error here. Please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. "Charlie" is found not only dead but decayed in his space suit. Wouldn't the freezing temp on the moon (he was in a sort of depression or under cover) have prevented that???
Oh well.
Not one I really got into, found the arguments a bit boring after a while. See what you think. Mediocre for me.
July 20, 2011
The most enjoyable sci-fi book I have read - and I must have read it at least 3 times, which is rare for me. I've enjoyed all his works and am sad that he died so young (compared with me!)
April 29, 2024
I was introduced to this book in a college introductory archaeology course. I was a bit flabbergasted when I first saw the assignment. I'd read my share of science fiction up to that point, and didn't see what I could gain from a science fiction book that would benefit me in learning archaeology.
Well, after I read it, I saw.
A human skeleton is found on the moon, which is mysterious in and of itself. The more disturbing fact of the discovery, however, is not the simple presence of the remains. It's that the remains date back to the prehistoric era. The implications are staggering.
Inherit the Stars is thinking readers' science fiction at its best. The mystery pulls the reader in and drags him or her along on an intellectual ride. The unraveling of the mystery continues on in the book's sequels, but the first book in the series is by far the best.
Well, after I read it, I saw.
A human skeleton is found on the moon, which is mysterious in and of itself. The more disturbing fact of the discovery, however, is not the simple presence of the remains. It's that the remains date back to the prehistoric era. The implications are staggering.
Inherit the Stars is thinking readers' science fiction at its best. The mystery pulls the reader in and drags him or her along on an intellectual ride. The unraveling of the mystery continues on in the book's sequels, but the first book in the series is by far the best.
July 7, 2022
This is an early work by Hogan, first published in 1977 just before he became a full time writer, and one of my favorites by him. Like many of Hogan's novels, this starts off a bit slow, with lots of info dumps by way of introducing the world and the lead characters, but once the stage is set, it moves with a respectable pace.
Our lead, Vic, is (of course) a scientist, working as something of an 'idea man' for a subsidiary of a large firm in England. He came up with an idea for a new scanner which is more powerful than an X-ray and can take detailed 'views' up to a microscopic level of just about anything. One day, he is recalled to Portland, OR, along with the prototype of the new scope. Why? People on the Moon have discovered a dead human body there, and it seems to be about 50,000 years old! Now how did a spacesuited human with obviously high tech gear end up on the moon so long ago?
Inherit the Stars is something of a high tech detective novel to be sure. Vic becomes integrated into the research team working on 'Charlie', bringing together a wide range of scientific disciplines, acting something like a point person to coordinate the research. Things get further complicated when an alien spacecraft is discovered on Ganymede that crashed there about 25 million years ago and within it are a wide range of animal species from Earth long extinct. Is there some connection? What could it possibly be?
Hogan toned down the far-out physics/science here, although of course there are numerous discussions surrounding Charlie and theories about who he was and how he got to the moon. As typical, this is really a plot driven novel cast in a near future (this is set just about now, e.g., 2020 or so). Humanity has put aside prejudice and strife and largely has resolved issues that led to war and such. Unprecedented peace and prosperity abound and the vast war budgets now fueling outer space exploration, with manned bases on the moon, Mars, and even Ganymede. Such an optimistic vision of the future! That is one of the things I like most about Hogan-- his infectious optimism about humanity in general once they put aside ethic and other issues and focus on science and new discoveries to advance the human race.
So, is this a classic? Well, maybe. The 'tech' is not really all that dated and Hogan manages to present a somewhat realistic near future; obviously, however, the shared prosperity has yet to materialize and the 'petty' cultural, ethic and other differences that have long divided the human race are far from going away. Yet, the quest to solve the biggest mystery every faced by humanity is a lot of fun, although I had some inklings on how it would be resolved pretty early on, and not just because this is a reread. Good stuff from Hogan, and if you have never read him, this would be a good place to start. 4 solid stars!!
Our lead, Vic, is (of course) a scientist, working as something of an 'idea man' for a subsidiary of a large firm in England. He came up with an idea for a new scanner which is more powerful than an X-ray and can take detailed 'views' up to a microscopic level of just about anything. One day, he is recalled to Portland, OR, along with the prototype of the new scope. Why? People on the Moon have discovered a dead human body there, and it seems to be about 50,000 years old! Now how did a spacesuited human with obviously high tech gear end up on the moon so long ago?
Inherit the Stars is something of a high tech detective novel to be sure. Vic becomes integrated into the research team working on 'Charlie', bringing together a wide range of scientific disciplines, acting something like a point person to coordinate the research. Things get further complicated when an alien spacecraft is discovered on Ganymede that crashed there about 25 million years ago and within it are a wide range of animal species from Earth long extinct. Is there some connection? What could it possibly be?
Hogan toned down the far-out physics/science here, although of course there are numerous discussions surrounding Charlie and theories about who he was and how he got to the moon. As typical, this is really a plot driven novel cast in a near future (this is set just about now, e.g., 2020 or so). Humanity has put aside prejudice and strife and largely has resolved issues that led to war and such. Unprecedented peace and prosperity abound and the vast war budgets now fueling outer space exploration, with manned bases on the moon, Mars, and even Ganymede. Such an optimistic vision of the future! That is one of the things I like most about Hogan-- his infectious optimism about humanity in general once they put aside ethic and other issues and focus on science and new discoveries to advance the human race.
So, is this a classic? Well, maybe. The 'tech' is not really all that dated and Hogan manages to present a somewhat realistic near future; obviously, however, the shared prosperity has yet to materialize and the 'petty' cultural, ethic and other differences that have long divided the human race are far from going away. Yet, the quest to solve the biggest mystery every faced by humanity is a lot of fun, although I had some inklings on how it would be resolved pretty early on, and not just because this is a reread. Good stuff from Hogan, and if you have never read him, this would be a good place to start. 4 solid stars!!
April 22, 2024
Intriguing near future space mystery touching on humanity's ancient history and place within the galaxy. However, it's told through a very dry, academic lens with a narrative that systematically puzzles through clue after clue. The pace is slow and there is hard sci-fi overload to the point of tedium. As a warning to potential readers I'll say that it is very easy to get too much in the way of spoilers from reading reviews. Best to go into this relatively blind.
June 25, 2010
3.5 stars. This is the first book by James P. Hogan that I have read and I was very impressed. This was a well thought out, hard SF book that was also a terrific, engaging story. The plot is basically a SF mystery that keeps you guessing until the very end (which does not disappoint). I look forward to reading the other two books in this series. Recommended.
January 11, 2026
So – Charlie couldn’t possibly have come from Earth. Neither could he possibly have come from anywhere else. Therefore, Charlie couldn’t exist.
But he did.
Charlie is the nickname given to a humanoid corpse in a red spacesuit, found on the Moon by Earth exploration teams in 2027. Preliminary tests reveal two contradictory facts: Charlie is 50000 years old, and his biological profile (DNA, anatomy, etc) is 100% homo sapiens. Charlie is both an alien and human.
A team of scientists is gathered to interpret the data and provide the answers to this dilemma.
>>><<<>>><<<
James Hogan was an engineer who started writing after a remark that he found the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey too poetic and confusing in its monumental finale. His work colleagues offered a bet that Hogan couldn’t write a SF novel. Inherit the Stars is Hogan’s answer and his first published book.
I was both thrilled and annoyed by the story. For starters, this is hard-SF with a focus on science to the exclusion of everything else. It is extremely dry and plotless, unless you consider the slow progression through trial and error of scientific research to be thrilling.
On the other hand, hard-SF was my first literary infatuation, starting with Jules Verne and going through Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein and all the rest. The best parts of Hogan’s story remind me of Rendez-vous with Rama , only instead of a Big Dumb Object as the puzzle at the core of the investigation we have an ancient corpse and its belongings.
We started out with a body and a few scraps of paper, and from them we reconstructed a whole world.
The novel is a detailed description of this process, with some minimal notes about Earth in the third decade of the third millennium thrown in. These will start to make sense only in the concluding arguments that humanity deserves to inherit the stars, but it’s a long and twisted journey to get at the answers.
By universal assent, world demilitarization became fact.
Hogan is either an optimist or naive, in view of the reader who looks at the news as he reads this 1977 text today. His belief in our better nature and in the power of science to sway popular opinion is not borne by historical data. which poses quite an interesting question: how would Hogan amend his theories about the future if he was still among us in 2027?
Nevertheless, the best part of the book for me is the author’s description and support of the scientific method as the best tool in our search for truth.
The trail behind this rapid succession of new developments was by this time littered with the abandoned carcasses of dead ideas. It reminded the scientists forcibly of the pitfalls that await the unwary when speculation is given too free a rein and imagination is allowed to float further and further aloft from the firm grounds of demonstrable proof and scientific rigor.
Most of the story is told from the perspective of Victor Hunt, a sort of theoretical genius who is put in charge of coordinating the various specialized teams analysing the primary data (biological, linguistics, mathematics, astronomy, geology, etc). The leader of the biology team, Danchecker, is positioned both as a cautionary tale and as a catalyst for new thinking. In a novel completely devoid of character development (an of gender balance), the intellectual tennis match between the two scientists provides the only tension.
“In my estimation, an attitude like yours is too inflexible to permit an unbiased appraisal of the problem. You’ve already made up your mind what you want the answers to be.”
>>><<<>>><<<
I am trying very hard here to say nothing about the succession of theories tried and abandoned for the presence of Charlie on the Moon, and the presence of a race of giant aliens whose ship is discovered under thick ice on Ganymede in later developments. Without the puzzle, there is not enough motivation to keep reading, although the final chapters do rise to the level of classic SF masterpiece, with their focus on humanity as a whole in the context of a much larger universe. Even the sense of wonder that I always expect from the genre is finally there:
He raised his eyes, and gasped involuntarily. Above him, five times larger than the Moon seen from Earth, was the full disk of Jupiter.
No photograph he had ever seen, or any image reproduced on a display screen, could compare with the grandeur of that sight.
As a coda, and spoiler free closing remark about the question of our destiny among the stars, I have the last entry from the personal journal of Charlie the corpse:
There should be better ways for people to spend their lives than in factories, mines, and army camps. Can’t think what, though – that’s all we’ve ever known. But if there is warmth and color and light somewhere in this Universe, then maybe something worthwhile will come out of what we’ve been through.
Are we capable of learning from the lessons of history and science? Or are we doomed to a path of annihilation, both of the planet and of the race? Is violence hard-coded into our DNA?
But he did.
Charlie is the nickname given to a humanoid corpse in a red spacesuit, found on the Moon by Earth exploration teams in 2027. Preliminary tests reveal two contradictory facts: Charlie is 50000 years old, and his biological profile (DNA, anatomy, etc) is 100% homo sapiens. Charlie is both an alien and human.
A team of scientists is gathered to interpret the data and provide the answers to this dilemma.
>>><<<>>><<<
James Hogan was an engineer who started writing after a remark that he found the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey too poetic and confusing in its monumental finale. His work colleagues offered a bet that Hogan couldn’t write a SF novel. Inherit the Stars is Hogan’s answer and his first published book.
I was both thrilled and annoyed by the story. For starters, this is hard-SF with a focus on science to the exclusion of everything else. It is extremely dry and plotless, unless you consider the slow progression through trial and error of scientific research to be thrilling.
On the other hand, hard-SF was my first literary infatuation, starting with Jules Verne and going through Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein and all the rest. The best parts of Hogan’s story remind me of Rendez-vous with Rama , only instead of a Big Dumb Object as the puzzle at the core of the investigation we have an ancient corpse and its belongings.
We started out with a body and a few scraps of paper, and from them we reconstructed a whole world.
The novel is a detailed description of this process, with some minimal notes about Earth in the third decade of the third millennium thrown in. These will start to make sense only in the concluding arguments that humanity deserves to inherit the stars, but it’s a long and twisted journey to get at the answers.
By universal assent, world demilitarization became fact.
Hogan is either an optimist or naive, in view of the reader who looks at the news as he reads this 1977 text today. His belief in our better nature and in the power of science to sway popular opinion is not borne by historical data. which poses quite an interesting question: how would Hogan amend his theories about the future if he was still among us in 2027?
Nevertheless, the best part of the book for me is the author’s description and support of the scientific method as the best tool in our search for truth.
The trail behind this rapid succession of new developments was by this time littered with the abandoned carcasses of dead ideas. It reminded the scientists forcibly of the pitfalls that await the unwary when speculation is given too free a rein and imagination is allowed to float further and further aloft from the firm grounds of demonstrable proof and scientific rigor.
Most of the story is told from the perspective of Victor Hunt, a sort of theoretical genius who is put in charge of coordinating the various specialized teams analysing the primary data (biological, linguistics, mathematics, astronomy, geology, etc). The leader of the biology team, Danchecker, is positioned both as a cautionary tale and as a catalyst for new thinking. In a novel completely devoid of character development (an of gender balance), the intellectual tennis match between the two scientists provides the only tension.
“In my estimation, an attitude like yours is too inflexible to permit an unbiased appraisal of the problem. You’ve already made up your mind what you want the answers to be.”
>>><<<>>><<<
I am trying very hard here to say nothing about the succession of theories tried and abandoned for the presence of Charlie on the Moon, and the presence of a race of giant aliens whose ship is discovered under thick ice on Ganymede in later developments. Without the puzzle, there is not enough motivation to keep reading, although the final chapters do rise to the level of classic SF masterpiece, with their focus on humanity as a whole in the context of a much larger universe. Even the sense of wonder that I always expect from the genre is finally there:
He raised his eyes, and gasped involuntarily. Above him, five times larger than the Moon seen from Earth, was the full disk of Jupiter.
No photograph he had ever seen, or any image reproduced on a display screen, could compare with the grandeur of that sight.
As a coda, and spoiler free closing remark about the question of our destiny among the stars, I have the last entry from the personal journal of Charlie the corpse:
There should be better ways for people to spend their lives than in factories, mines, and army camps. Can’t think what, though – that’s all we’ve ever known. But if there is warmth and color and light somewhere in this Universe, then maybe something worthwhile will come out of what we’ve been through.
Are we capable of learning from the lessons of history and science? Or are we doomed to a path of annihilation, both of the planet and of the race? Is violence hard-coded into our DNA?
October 1, 2024
I've been cautioned that saying an author's first novel is their best novel is rude and in poor taste, because you're implying that their career was just a downhill slide, but sometimes it's true and you've got to go with what you believe. Extenuating circumstances and personal conditions are a big influence of your reading experience too, of course; I remember taking my father to lunch one fine warm day in 1977. We had a good meal at Lum's and then he popped into the barber shop for a haircut, and I went to the bookstore next door to wait. The nifty Darrell K. Sweet cover to Inherit the Stars caught my eye, the back cover description sounded intriguing, and there was a blurb from Asimov on the front, so I gave it a try. I loved it! It's a hard-sf puzzle story, and though you know how it's going to conclude it's riveting. The narration shifts between the near-future speculation and investigation, and the events of 50,000 years ago that led to The Mummy on The Moon. The science is easily followed, the characters are interesting, and the story is a lot of fun.
August 30, 2025
Американці та русня співпрацюють, інтернаціональне майбутнє на благо людства... Гівняний прогноз. В той час, коли Дік в книгах пише що русня - це гній, цей дядько їх облизує. Тільки спаплюжив настрій цим лайном
October 24, 2010
About as hard si fi as you can get. I love a detective story & combined with science fiction it is perfect! Sure, there is little character development, but instead there are character types and an abundance of the kind of ungrounded scientific certainty that can delay scientific break throughs. Made me think of a book I read to my children when they were going through their, long, dinosaur phase (fueled by yearly visits to the dinosaur museum in Drumheller, Alberta), "T.rex and the Crater of Doom" about real life "scientific detective work" concerning the Yucatan meteor / asteroid / comet crater complete with all the academic jealousies and theoretical rigidities that I can fully relate to as an academic! The dogmatic theoretician is the bane of academia as far as I am concerned! Let the evidence speak for itself.
Must get my cyber hands on the sequels!
Must get my cyber hands on the sequels!
August 22, 2024
Sci-fi as hard as diamonds in an ice storm!
This book takes a loooong time to get interesting. I was a third of the way into it and thinking about DNFing it. I’m very glad I kept going. The story centres on the discovery of a 50,000 year old human body on the moon but instead of being a fast paced action story it unfolds in a dry,by the numbers account of the scientific method. Two camps form among the scientists: the ones who believe the body originated on earth and the ones who believe it was of alien origin. They continue to make small discoveries and piece the bigger picture together throughout the book. From about halfway through it really gets going and starts to use currently accepted findings on cosmology and evolution to weave a huge story that’s a mind blowing payoff to an otherwise slow book.
This book takes a loooong time to get interesting. I was a third of the way into it and thinking about DNFing it. I’m very glad I kept going. The story centres on the discovery of a 50,000 year old human body on the moon but instead of being a fast paced action story it unfolds in a dry,by the numbers account of the scientific method. Two camps form among the scientists: the ones who believe the body originated on earth and the ones who believe it was of alien origin. They continue to make small discoveries and piece the bigger picture together throughout the book. From about halfway through it really gets going and starts to use currently accepted findings on cosmology and evolution to weave a huge story that’s a mind blowing payoff to an otherwise slow book.
October 3, 2024
Written in the 1970's the author brilliantly predicts quite a bit that's true about the 21st century - sure, we're behind schedule on those flying cars and we've banned smoking but when it comes to his predictions on electronic gizmos he's fairly accurate. Unique storyline with great twist for an ending, I found this to be a very enjoyable science fiction book.
July 18, 2009
This book astounded me when I first read it. The ideas, the writing, hard science fiction was fairly new for me then.
The discovery of a human mummy in a space suit on the moon causes a sensation when carbon dating shows it's age as greater the humans on Earth.
The discovery of a human mummy in a space suit on the moon causes a sensation when carbon dating shows it's age as greater the humans on Earth.
August 23, 2017
I'm not entirely sure what to make of this book. If I'm not mistaken, while it isn't considered a 'classic' by many, it is sort of a 'check this out' sort of book that circulates within the hard-sci fi community.
I've been aware of this existing for a long time, but never thought of it as something I really needed to complete my education within the genre, but when I found it at a used bookstore for super cheap I couldn't resist picking it up.
The premise, that explorers on the moon uncover a 50,000 year old corpse buried in the regolith - a human corpse - is awesome. The byline on the title says this is a book about man's place in the universe. I see that. I was hooked.
I ended up, however, being just a bit underwhelmed by the story itself. Narratively, there is almost nothing that happens here. It's the story of a guy that has all this contradictory evidence in front of him and how he figures out how the corpse ended up on the moon. No romance to speak of, no personal drama, no mention really of family or regrets in life. Just a guy doing his job.
It gets a bit unintentionally funny at times, mostly because the author is showing us life in the early decades of the 21st century (I think the 2020's) and what everyday life is like. At one point, after uncovering a diary that was with the corpse, they find a page that is especially interesting, so they decide to print a copy in order to confirm a hypothesis about what was on the page.
The following exchange takes place:
"Sit down there at the master console. That's right. Now activate the control keyboard... Press the red button - that one."
"What do I do now?"
"Type this: FC comma DACCO seven slash PCH dot P, slash HCU dot one. That means 'functional control mode, data access program subsystem number seven selected, access data file reference "Project Charlie, Book one," page sixty-seven, optical format, output on hard copy unit, one copy.'"
"It does? Really? Great!"
In case you missed it, that is how people print in the future. Go figure. Oh, and there is another full paragraph that continues to explain the concept of a printer that follows. Again, in the seventies when this came out I would probably have loved it, and anytime you're trying to guess what everyday life will be like in 50 years then I suppose you're going to get lots of stuff wrong. And this book, well, it gets lots of stuff wrong.
There is a long conversation about the moon, its formation, the early state of the solar system, all sorts of stuff like that. And while it's tough to declare any of the things stated in the book as obviously wrong, scientific data since the book was released strongly implies that the entire hypothesis of this novel is implausible at best
So, we have a novel that has almost no narrative to speak of, that gives us a look at a future (almost present) that doesn't look very much like the world of today, and they have a mystery to solve. One that can only be answered by science. That part did interest me, and that's the part that makes this worth reading. I won't go so far as to recommend it, but you know, you might want to check it out if you're into that sort of thing.
I've been aware of this existing for a long time, but never thought of it as something I really needed to complete my education within the genre, but when I found it at a used bookstore for super cheap I couldn't resist picking it up.
The premise, that explorers on the moon uncover a 50,000 year old corpse buried in the regolith - a human corpse - is awesome. The byline on the title says this is a book about man's place in the universe. I see that. I was hooked.
I ended up, however, being just a bit underwhelmed by the story itself. Narratively, there is almost nothing that happens here. It's the story of a guy that has all this contradictory evidence in front of him and how he figures out how the corpse ended up on the moon. No romance to speak of, no personal drama, no mention really of family or regrets in life. Just a guy doing his job.
It gets a bit unintentionally funny at times, mostly because the author is showing us life in the early decades of the 21st century (I think the 2020's) and what everyday life is like. At one point, after uncovering a diary that was with the corpse, they find a page that is especially interesting, so they decide to print a copy in order to confirm a hypothesis about what was on the page.
The following exchange takes place:
"Sit down there at the master console. That's right. Now activate the control keyboard... Press the red button - that one."
"What do I do now?"
"Type this: FC comma DACCO seven slash PCH dot P, slash HCU dot one. That means 'functional control mode, data access program subsystem number seven selected, access data file reference "Project Charlie, Book one," page sixty-seven, optical format, output on hard copy unit, one copy.'"
"It does? Really? Great!"
In case you missed it, that is how people print in the future. Go figure. Oh, and there is another full paragraph that continues to explain the concept of a printer that follows. Again, in the seventies when this came out I would probably have loved it, and anytime you're trying to guess what everyday life will be like in 50 years then I suppose you're going to get lots of stuff wrong. And this book, well, it gets lots of stuff wrong.
There is a long conversation about the moon, its formation, the early state of the solar system, all sorts of stuff like that. And while it's tough to declare any of the things stated in the book as obviously wrong, scientific data since the book was released strongly implies that the entire hypothesis of this novel is implausible at best
So, we have a novel that has almost no narrative to speak of, that gives us a look at a future (almost present) that doesn't look very much like the world of today, and they have a mystery to solve. One that can only be answered by science. That part did interest me, and that's the part that makes this worth reading. I won't go so far as to recommend it, but you know, you might want to check it out if you're into that sort of thing.
February 26, 2014
First book in the greatest SciFi trilogy of all time! Spectacular! Genuine hard science SciFi. You're in the story as the scientists develop their hypotheses, test them, learn more, revise them, and move the story forward. Great plot and storyline. Very well-written. Both believable and very stretching. This book pulled me in like no other. It sets up the Giants' series to be the most interesting, surprising, well-written, and meaningful of all science fiction trilogies (plus 2) up to the present time. A model of how to develop and write hard SciFi.
This book launches one of the most interesting, creative ideas on where humankind really came from.
Impossible to put down. Exciting, amusing, great characters, great interplay between them. Sets up some of the best alien civilizations ever described. Has never been bettered.
This book launches one of the most interesting, creative ideas on where humankind really came from.
Impossible to put down. Exciting, amusing, great characters, great interplay between them. Sets up some of the best alien civilizations ever described. Has never been bettered.
December 1, 2023
Inherit the Stars by James P Hogen ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.5
It’s set in the near future (maybe 2030s even) and astronauts on the moon find skelly there…and it turns out that skelly is 50,000 years old.
Who is this skelly and how did he get there?
Read and find out! Hard SF as it should be done.
Audiobook is superb.
It’s set in the near future (maybe 2030s even) and astronauts on the moon find skelly there…and it turns out that skelly is 50,000 years old.
Who is this skelly and how did he get there?
Read and find out! Hard SF as it should be done.
Audiobook is superb.
July 10, 2011
Part of the best series I've ever read. The second book is even better, the third incredible.
December 4, 2022
Cannot express how much I truly enjoyed this read. What a great detective-esque story telling the origins of a species. Page turner through and through.
July 26, 2023
Hard science book akin to rendezvous with rama—- but with significantly more scientific speculation…
In just 10 years from now a body is discovered on the moon. But we arent missing anyone, and he has advanced technology with him. Carbon dating puts him at dying 50,000 years ago. This single discovery changes what we know about our planet, our solar system and even our own history.
Would recommend! But know there isnt character development but rather the delivery of big what-ifs and ideas:.::
In just 10 years from now a body is discovered on the moon. But we arent missing anyone, and he has advanced technology with him. Carbon dating puts him at dying 50,000 years ago. This single discovery changes what we know about our planet, our solar system and even our own history.
Would recommend! But know there isnt character development but rather the delivery of big what-ifs and ideas:.::
December 7, 2020
A re-read after 40 years. (Wow.)
This was Hogan’s first book and its ideas are crazy huge. Discovering a dead astronaut on the moon is one thing, but when scientists realize he’s been there for 50,000 years, well, things get really interesting. This is a full-on mystery-meets-archeology novel except set in the semi-distant future of 2027, a full half-century after the book was published. (Coincidentally in May 1977, the same time Star Wars came out. As with my first viewing of Star Wars, I read it a couple months later. On a geeky level, 12-year-old me *loved* the summer of 1977.)
When revisiting older SF that’s set more or less in our present, it’s fun to see what conformed and what diverged from the author’s prognostications. There will usually be some crazy misses and some eerie accuracies; here Hogan has more of the former than the latter.
First of all, the smoking. Characters do it constantly. Which was common back then, and one thing I don’t miss from the 70s and 80s. I was constantly ill from all the cigarette smoke. Hogan assumes, as most people did, that this would continue indefinitely, to the point where his characters smoke aboard spaceships. Cigs, pipes, stogies... basically everything except weed.
The USSR still exists. They aren’t a big player here, because the world has backed off from the brink of WWIII, but the Soviet Union still exists. That was also a common assumption back then. Right up until the minute the USSR no longer existed everyone figured it would last a while.
Flying cars so common you can rent them. I’m really glad these don’t exist. People suck at driving on the ground; I certainly don’t need to also worry they will crash into my second-story bedroom. Of course, maybe the rentals are strictly aircraft; Hogan isn’t really clear there.
Video phones. This is a half-hit. No one except Chester Gould, creator of the comic Dick Tracy, imagined our smartphones, so having phone booths that were also video booths wasn’t unreasonable.
The thing that Hogan does get right and his main character Vic Hunt invented, is a “nucleonic imager” that can see inside bodies and even read books without opening the pages. Hogan effectively came up with a combination of the CAT scan, the MRI (which coincidentally debuted in July 1977), and the PET scan. At the time no one thought to use such devices to read closed books, but we’ve since used them to read ancient scrolls that are too fragile to touch, let alone open. One set of scrolls was burned and crushed in a fire some 1,500 years ago, turning them into charcoal, but a CT scan lets us read the surviving pages inside. In some regards we live in an age of miracles.
A new age of reason. Boy-howdy did he miss this one by a country mile. Ironically, 20 years after this was published, Hogan was one of those people turning back the clock on scientific literacy, going all-in on crackpot theories and snake oil. Back in the late 90s on Usenet on rec.arts.sf.written we talked about how he (among others) had become a victim of the Brain Eater, which consumed the rational part of his brain. He became a climate change denier, a Holocaust denier, refused to believe AIDS was caused by a virus, and was probably an anti-vaxxer, too.
Which is weird considering how much this book celebrates the scientific process. He assembles a team to solve the mystery of the dead man on the moon from every discipline— physics to biology to linguistics to anatomy — all led by a couple of no-nonsense engineers, and eventually they do solve it, in a most satisfying way. That’s why it was so baffling to watch Hogan pivot from that attitude, don a tinfoil hat and take up residence in Crazytown.
But this story happens before all that, before his marbles went missing, and he brings all the pieces of his story together elegantly at the end.
There are some cringey “yeesh dude” moments, such as the casual unstated sexism. There are no women of importance here aside from a secretary (yes, a secretary) whose observation that the peculiar table in the dead man’s book looks like a calendar unlocks the whole shebang. Then main dude (and obvious Marty Stu) Vic casually takes credit for it later, with her approving wink. Ouch.
I re-read this book a lot back then, but even by 1980 I recognized the implied sexism. At 12 I would’ve given this 5 stars for the sheer coolness factor. At 15 I was already seeing cracks in storytelling that I found satisfying not long before. It’s the same reason I loved Star Wars in July of 1977 but hated Empire Strikes Back in May of 1980: I was growing up but the stories didn’t.
Still, the ideas are paramount here. Characters are not even secondary, they barely exist other than to take different sides in arguments. On the idea side, this is still cool. If you’re looking for more than that, you’ll need to search elsewhere.
This was Hogan’s first book and its ideas are crazy huge. Discovering a dead astronaut on the moon is one thing, but when scientists realize he’s been there for 50,000 years, well, things get really interesting. This is a full-on mystery-meets-archeology novel except set in the semi-distant future of 2027, a full half-century after the book was published. (Coincidentally in May 1977, the same time Star Wars came out. As with my first viewing of Star Wars, I read it a couple months later. On a geeky level, 12-year-old me *loved* the summer of 1977.)
When revisiting older SF that’s set more or less in our present, it’s fun to see what conformed and what diverged from the author’s prognostications. There will usually be some crazy misses and some eerie accuracies; here Hogan has more of the former than the latter.
First of all, the smoking. Characters do it constantly. Which was common back then, and one thing I don’t miss from the 70s and 80s. I was constantly ill from all the cigarette smoke. Hogan assumes, as most people did, that this would continue indefinitely, to the point where his characters smoke aboard spaceships. Cigs, pipes, stogies... basically everything except weed.
The USSR still exists. They aren’t a big player here, because the world has backed off from the brink of WWIII, but the Soviet Union still exists. That was also a common assumption back then. Right up until the minute the USSR no longer existed everyone figured it would last a while.
Flying cars so common you can rent them. I’m really glad these don’t exist. People suck at driving on the ground; I certainly don’t need to also worry they will crash into my second-story bedroom. Of course, maybe the rentals are strictly aircraft; Hogan isn’t really clear there.
Video phones. This is a half-hit. No one except Chester Gould, creator of the comic Dick Tracy, imagined our smartphones, so having phone booths that were also video booths wasn’t unreasonable.
The thing that Hogan does get right and his main character Vic Hunt invented, is a “nucleonic imager” that can see inside bodies and even read books without opening the pages. Hogan effectively came up with a combination of the CAT scan, the MRI (which coincidentally debuted in July 1977), and the PET scan. At the time no one thought to use such devices to read closed books, but we’ve since used them to read ancient scrolls that are too fragile to touch, let alone open. One set of scrolls was burned and crushed in a fire some 1,500 years ago, turning them into charcoal, but a CT scan lets us read the surviving pages inside. In some regards we live in an age of miracles.
A new age of reason. Boy-howdy did he miss this one by a country mile. Ironically, 20 years after this was published, Hogan was one of those people turning back the clock on scientific literacy, going all-in on crackpot theories and snake oil. Back in the late 90s on Usenet on rec.arts.sf.written we talked about how he (among others) had become a victim of the Brain Eater, which consumed the rational part of his brain. He became a climate change denier, a Holocaust denier, refused to believe AIDS was caused by a virus, and was probably an anti-vaxxer, too.
Which is weird considering how much this book celebrates the scientific process. He assembles a team to solve the mystery of the dead man on the moon from every discipline— physics to biology to linguistics to anatomy — all led by a couple of no-nonsense engineers, and eventually they do solve it, in a most satisfying way. That’s why it was so baffling to watch Hogan pivot from that attitude, don a tinfoil hat and take up residence in Crazytown.
But this story happens before all that, before his marbles went missing, and he brings all the pieces of his story together elegantly at the end.
There are some cringey “yeesh dude” moments, such as the casual unstated sexism. There are no women of importance here aside from a secretary (yes, a secretary) whose observation that the peculiar table in the dead man’s book looks like a calendar unlocks the whole shebang. Then main dude (and obvious Marty Stu) Vic casually takes credit for it later, with her approving wink. Ouch.
I re-read this book a lot back then, but even by 1980 I recognized the implied sexism. At 12 I would’ve given this 5 stars for the sheer coolness factor. At 15 I was already seeing cracks in storytelling that I found satisfying not long before. It’s the same reason I loved Star Wars in July of 1977 but hated Empire Strikes Back in May of 1980: I was growing up but the stories didn’t.
Still, the ideas are paramount here. Characters are not even secondary, they barely exist other than to take different sides in arguments. On the idea side, this is still cool. If you’re looking for more than that, you’ll need to search elsewhere.
February 6, 2026
I found it to be classic, idea-driven science fiction at its most exhilarating. It's built around a mystery so compelling it carries you forward almost effortlessly. The characters are imperfect and sometimes a bit rough around the edges, but they’re aware of their limitations in a way that feels honest rather than accidental. Yes, the book shows its age, some attitudes and assumptions are unmistakably old-fashioned, but the sheer thrill of discovery more than compensates. Hogan’s step-by-step unraveling of the central puzzle is deeply satisfying, reminding you how powerful science fiction can be when it trusts curiosity, logic, and wonder to do the heavy lifting.
June 28, 2024
I just finished re reading this after a considerable lapse, maybe 25 years. Still good. Still loved the resolution. Some of the science has aged poorly, but that's hardly surprising. Also, the attitudes of the characters are stuck in the 70s, again, not surprising and not an issue for me. YEMV. But reading the journal entries and reliving the horror of those moments, and the image he draws of all those people spread out behind, awaiting rescue, with night coming down. It gave me shivers when I was 14, and still does. Only a 4/5 for some clunky bits of exposition.
November 4, 2012
I'm relatively new in the science fiction world, I have read most of the "classics" and "must-reads" and I was taken by surprise by this book. The book starts with one of the most amazing opening I have ever read and does an amazing job of filling in the pieces from there. I don't want to get into the plot because I feel this book is best enjoyed with knowing very little going into it. I would definitely recommend it to all readers.
July 29, 2008
I really enjoyed this one. It starts with a wonderful mystery and then unravels the answer through a wonderful combination of science fact and science fiction. Wonderful.
June 28, 2020
Il libro mi è piaciuto abbastanza fin da subito, ma con il finale si prende la quarta stellina: è il racconto di una scoperta importante la cui indagine "archeologica" aprirà numerosi interrogativi che dovranno essere affrontati in modo multidisciplinare. Il resoconto di questi studi procede con metodo e tira le fila in una ipotetica conclusione davvero mirabile, dove tutto torna molto bene. Purtroppo non si può dire di più senza spoilerare, ma è una bella fantascienza, classica e originale al tempo stesso.
September 7, 2020
A lot about this book reminded me of Rendezvous With Rama and that's a good thing. This is a good book if you're into both "hard" and vintage science fiction. I remember seeing this book back in my teens in the mall bookstores and its premise always intrigued me. The story lives up to its premise and I was never bored with it. Its only weakness is that it lacked the "romance" aspect behind the story. By that I mean it's a bit dry. The characters are there to debate the different hypotheses presented, and that's it. I like a bit more "opera" in my space opera.
November 1, 2007
This book addresses some anomalies in our moon and solar system that are eventually explained by events that occurred during prehistoric times. VERY interesting with a great ending. The sequels to this are also good reading.
January 15, 2018
If you like real heady, hard SF, this will tickle your fancy. I quite enjoyed it.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 608 reviews