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The Haunted Stars
The Haunted Stars is a science fiction novel by American writer Edmond Hamilton. It tells the story of an expedition from Earth (which is in the throes of an arms race) to a planet of the star Altair — a planet called Ryn, inhabited by humans like those on Earth. Against the wishes of Ryn's inhabitants, the team from Earth seek information about weapons technology used in an ancient space war. Their unsuccessful search ends in dramatic contact with another species, the ancient enemy of Ryn.
The novel was first published in 1960 by Torquil Books and belongs to a class of novels which add a darker tone to the popular tradition of space opera. It has been published in English, German, Italian, and Portuguese.
The action takes place in an imagined future a few years after the time of writing. Tension between the US and the Soviet Union remains high. Both nations have landed on the Moon, and established bases there.
Just under half the length of the novel tells how a discovery on the Moon brings Massachusetts linguist Robert Fairlie to a high-security space base in New Mexico and eventually to the planet Ryn. The remainder of the novel is about what happens on Ryn after Fairlie and his companions arrive: their contact with some of the inhabitants of the planet, and later with Ryn's ancient enemy, the "shadowed ones".
Why would an organization exploring the Moon need the services of a specialist in ancient languages? Professor Robert Fairlie of Massachusetts University ponders that question when he is shanghaied and taken to Morrow Base, America's spaceport, in New Mexico. At Morrow, with three other linguists drafted into the project, he learns that an American expedition to Gassendi crater has made a discovery which US authorities are keeping secret — machinery, documents and speech recordings left over from a battle thirty thousand years before. The four men have been brought to Morrow to translate the extraterrestrial language. They're to be supervised by the urbane Nils Christensen, chief of the Lunar Project, and the tightly wound and demanding Glenn DeWitt, whose background is military. The secrecy surrounding the project has to do with the arms race — it is considered most important that secrets of advanced extraterrestrial technology will not fall into the wrong hands.
Acting on a playful hunch, Fairlie discovers that the language of the ancient Moon base has remarkable similarities to Sumerian and he begins translating the material brought from Gassendi. The accuracy of Fairlie’s tentative translation is validated by a test of two super-powerful ion engines taken from a wrecked ship in Gassendi, a test in which DeWitt demonstrates his reckless character by ordering one of the engines turned on while there are people outside the bunker. Confident in his hypothesis, Fairlie translates more documents and discovers that the extraterrestrials called themselves Vanryn and came from Ryn, the third planet of Altair. Their bases on the Moon and elsewhere fought a losing battle against an enemy whom the documents don't describe in detail, but imply was not human — an enemy determined to stop human beings from travelling in space ever again. Meanwhile a biologist discovers that the Vanryn were the same species as modern humans on Earth — that modern Earth people are actually the descendants of Vanryn colonists.
With the translations that Fairlie and his colleagues produce, scientists and engineers (still working in secret) recreate the Vanryn machines, and then they build a starship. With Christensen in command and DeWitt, who hopes to find Vanryn super-weapons, as second in command, Fairlie and a team of others ride the ship towards Ryn. While the ship flies through hyperspace, they suffer nightmares about the Vanryn's mysterious enemies. On Ryn they land their ship next to the slagged remains of a once-great starport and the decayed ruins of the city that had stood by it, surrounded by forest.
In the brush-covered ruins they make contact with one of the inhabitants of Ryn, a young woman called Aral who is curious about the spacecraft. Fairlie discovers to his astonishment that she can understand him, that the Vanryn language has remained much the same for three hundred centuries. (He learns later that this is because the Vanryn have kept playable recordings of their ancestors' songs and speeches.) Even so, the party from Earth find it difficult to establish relations with the local people, most of whom avoid them. Not even the adventurous Aral wants to stay and talk.
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The Haunted Stars
The Haunted Stars is a science fiction novel by American writer Edmond Hamilton. It tells the story of an expedition from Earth (which is in the throes of an arms race) to a planet of the star Altair — a planet called Ryn, inhabited by humans like those on Earth. Against the wishes of Ryn's inhabitants, the team from Earth seek information about weapons technology used in an ancient space war. Their unsuccessful search ends in dramatic contact with another species, the ancient enemy of Ryn.
The novel was first published in 1960 by Torquil Books and belongs to a class of novels which add a darker tone to the popular tradition of space opera. It has been published in English, German, Italian, and Portuguese.
The action takes place in an imagined future a few years after the time of writing. Tension between the US and the Soviet Union remains high. Both nations have landed on the Moon, and established bases there.
Just under half the length of the novel tells how a discovery on the Moon brings Massachusetts linguist Robert Fairlie to a high-security space base in New Mexico and eventually to the planet Ryn. The remainder of the novel is about what happens on Ryn after Fairlie and his companions arrive: their contact with some of the inhabitants of the planet, and later with Ryn's ancient enemy, the "shadowed ones".
Why would an organization exploring the Moon need the services of a specialist in ancient languages? Professor Robert Fairlie of Massachusetts University ponders that question when he is shanghaied and taken to Morrow Base, America's spaceport, in New Mexico. At Morrow, with three other linguists drafted into the project, he learns that an American expedition to Gassendi crater has made a discovery which US authorities are keeping secret — machinery, documents and speech recordings left over from a battle thirty thousand years before. The four men have been brought to Morrow to translate the extraterrestrial language. They're to be supervised by the urbane Nils Christensen, chief of the Lunar Project, and the tightly wound and demanding Glenn DeWitt, whose background is military. The secrecy surrounding the project has to do with the arms race — it is considered most important that secrets of advanced extraterrestrial technology will not fall into the wrong hands.
Acting on a playful hunch, Fairlie discovers that the language of the ancient Moon base has remarkable similarities to Sumerian and he begins translating the material brought from Gassendi. The accuracy of Fairlie’s tentative translation is validated by a test of two super-powerful ion engines taken from a wrecked ship in Gassendi, a test in which DeWitt demonstrates his reckless character by ordering one of the engines turned on while there are people outside the bunker. Confident in his hypothesis, Fairlie translates more documents and discovers that the extraterrestrials called themselves Vanryn and came from Ryn, the third planet of Altair. Their bases on the Moon and elsewhere fought a losing battle against an enemy whom the documents don't describe in detail, but imply was not human — an enemy determined to stop human beings from travelling in space ever again. Meanwhile a biologist discovers that the Vanryn were the same species as modern humans on Earth — that modern Earth people are actually the descendants of Vanryn colonists.
With the translations that Fairlie and his colleagues produce, scientists and engineers (still working in secret) recreate the Vanryn machines, and then they build a starship. With Christensen in command and DeWitt, who hopes to find Vanryn super-weapons, as second in command, Fairlie and a team of others ride the ship towards Ryn. While the ship flies through hyperspace, they suffer nightmares about the Vanryn's mysterious enemies. On Ryn they land their ship next to the slagged remains of a once-great starport and the decayed ruins of the city that had stood by it, surrounded by forest.
In the brush-covered ruins they make contact with one of the inhabitants of Ryn, a young woman called Aral who is curious about the spacecraft. Fairlie discovers to his astonishment that she can understand him, that the Vanryn language has remained much the same for three hundred centuries. (He learns later that this is because the Vanryn have kept playable recordings of their ancestors' songs and speeches.) Even so, the party from Earth find it difficult to establish relations with the local people, most of whom avoid them. Not even the adventurous Aral wants to stay and talk.