Firestar by Michael F. Flynn
In attendance: John Gibbons, Cyndi and Wes Dunn, Jeff Rupley; Debbie Hodgkinson came in near the end. This is an ambitious book, and I think a lot of us liked what Flynn was trying to do, but we didn’t think he carried it off very successfully.
The focus on education as necessary to long-term technical advancement as a society was probably the most innovative and potentially interesting part of the book. Everyone liked this element at the beginning, particularly the kids’ reactions to the novel types of testing. But this theme was not as well developed later, and the coincidences of having the entire senior class reconnect in various ways with the Firestar project was just too much. One of the central moral issues in