The Friday Book Hooks #4
Meme inspired by Adele Bound in Books
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#Friday56

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A vintage scifi for my Book Hooks #4:

Alpha Centauri or Die,
by Leigh Brackett
scifi
1963
121 pages

FIRST LINE FRIDAY:

There were no more men in space.

BOOK BEGINNINGS:

There were no more men in space. The dark ships strode the ways between the worlds, lightless, silent, needing no human mind to guide them. The R-ships, carrying the freight and the passengers, keeping order, keeping the law, taking the Pax Terrae to the limits of the Solar System and guarding there the boundary which was not now ever to be crossed.

FRIDAY 56:

He knew where to land. The spot had been chosen from what they had seen of the data brought back by the RSS-1. To a robot ship, bitterly enough, belonged the honor of the first interstellar flight, and the only consolation Kirby had for that was that the R-ship had paid with its life for that piece of insolence. The information brought back from the reconnaissance flight had been kept secret, of course, but secrets have a way of getting out,when enough people are determined to know them, and on one clip of smuggled microfilm a place had been shown that looked well-nigh perfect for a colony. The knowledge that there was a habitable world in the system of Alpha Centauri had sparked this whole odyssey of the Lucy B. Davenport. Without that certainty she would have remained in her hidden cave in the Martian sea bottom until her own red rust was indistinguishable from the red sand.

MY VERDICT:
The book points to what we mean by intelligence, and what we should be ready to confront if we do price freedom. The freedom to be humans and not parts of a machine.

Click on the cover to read my full review

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