Como Newton en el siglo XVII o Einstein en el XX, McAndrew es el genio indiscutido de la física del siglo XXII. Los kemeks, minúsculos agujeros negros cargados y en rotación, no tienen secretos para quien ha descubierto la forma de usarlos como fuente de energía. Su dominio de la ciencia y un sin par sentido práctico le llevan a inventar los más sorprendentes artilugios como la primera nave interestelar sin efectos de inercia. La pilota su compañera, la capitana Jeanie Roker y juntos explorarán a fondo el sistema solar interior, el Halo de cometas que lo rodea y llegarán a viajar a Alfa Centauro, en medio de las más sorprendentes situaciones.

Vector de muerte; Momento de inercia; Todos los colores del vacío; La cacería del Manna; El planeta errante.

My reactions to reading this collection in 1997. Spoilers may follow.

*”Introduction: The McAndrew Chronicles -- Sheffield notes his confusion at separating the science from the pseudoscience he encountered as a teenager reading science fiction. He says no stories in this violate current scientific theories.

*”First Chronicle: Killing Vector” -- Introduction of the absent-minded and brilliant physicist McAndrew and his work in kernels (charged, rotating Kerr-Newman black holes). The McAndrew name and kernels seem to link this story to the Proteus Universe of Sheffield’s. A terrorist being transported on the ship McAndrew works on is sprung by his confederates though his plan goes very awry (he’s booted out of the universe) because of his incomplete knowledge of physics. The terrorist Yifter is head of the Hallucinogenic Freedom League which kills a billion people by putting hallucinogens in many of the water supplies of the world. This seems to point to a conception date for this story of sometime in the seventies. References to bio-feedback machines regenerating lost limbs, the central technology of the Proteus stories, is also mentioned here.

*”Second Chronicle: Moment of Inertia” -- McAndrew invents a balanced drive spaceship capable of traveling at 50 g acceleration. The trick is not generating that much power. It’s accelerating that quickly and keeping the passengers alive. McAndrew uses a moveable disk of superdense matter to cancel out the acceleration forces with gravity (the equivalence principle of Einstein). However, during the ship’s trial voyage, the disk gets stuck so McAndrew can’t decelerate safely.

*”Third Chronicle: All the Colors of the Vacuum” -- This story is interesting for a couple of things. I found the explanation for tapping “zero point energy” for a space drive interesting though in the book’s afterword where Sheffield comments on the scientific validity of this collection’s speculations no mention is made of it so its plausibility is in question. Sheffield uses the idea (I’m sure he didn’t invent it – this story was first published in 1981) of space colonies, here “arks” of asteroids traveling out of the solar system, as being composed of political, social, and religious malcontents. He details some of the problems they might have: accidents, strange sexual practices, infertility, and lack of crucial elements in their asteroids. He also details some solutions: sperm filters and delivery of additional asteroids. McAndrew learns of a physics genius living in the Ark of Massingham and goes to visit him.

*”Fourth Chronicle: The Manna Hunt” -- This is one of the neatest stories in the collection. McAndrew journeys to the Oort Cloud to find a vanished scientist who is mining the Oort Cloud for comets made of “complex organic molecules” to feed Earth’s teeming billions. Unfortunately, he encounters one on which life has evolved, and it kills him. (David Brin’s and Gregory Benford’s Heart of the Comet further develops the idea of evolved life in a comet.) McAndrew almost is killed too. He finds that, though the cometary life has plenty of food, it still competes for heat, including body heat.

*”Fifth Chronicle: Rogueworld” -- This story (first published in 1983) interestingly seems to anticipate chaos theory popularized in the late 1980s. It features the idea of a rogueworld – a planet expelled by the gravitational interactions of three or more stars in a solar system. As far as I know, the actual expelling of planets in such a situation has been proved theoretically but not experimentally. McAndrew (with his daughter by narrator Jeanie Raker) encounter a rogueworld which does not rotate. Because it encounters no other bodies and does not rotate, it has accumulated a vast store of energy (manifested in earthquakes) in a”unstable equilibrium” and unrealized by tidal interaction. However, the landing on the rogueworld of humans upsets the delicate system. ( )

Indeholder "Introduction: The McAndrew Chronicles", "First Chronicle: Killing Vector", "Second Chronicle: Moment of Inertia", "Third Chronicle: All the Colours of the Vacuum", "Fourth Chronicle: The Manna Hunt", "Fifth Chronicle: Rogueworld", "Appendix: The science in the science fiction".

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