{"id":1314,"date":"1997-07-01T16:48:10","date_gmt":"1997-07-01T16:48:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/?p=1314"},"modified":"2012-04-25T16:48:52","modified_gmt":"2012-04-25T16:48:52","slug":"starplex","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/?p=1314","title":{"rendered":"Starplex"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3><em>Starplex<\/em> by Robert J.           Sawyer<\/h3>\n<p>Attendees: Renee Babcock; A. T. Campbell, III; Fred             Duarte, Jr.; Matthew Duarte, Cyndi Dunn; Emily Gamboa;             Mona Gamboa; Ruben Gamboa; John Gibbons; Debbie             Hodgkinson; Karen Meschke, Elaine Powell; Jeff Rupley;             Willie Siros; Lori Wolf.<\/p>\n<p>We held the July 1 meeting in an unusual location &#8212;             Elaine Powell&#8217;s pool. Last summer&#8217;s pool party was much             fun that Elaine had us over again. Elaine provided             drinks and munchies, Pizza Hut catered dinner, and John             Gibbons made a delicious dessert. Between eating,             visiting, and swimming, we actually did talk about the<!--more--> book. The whole discussion was conducted in the pool,             so my notes are a little soggy.<\/p>\n<p>The book discussed was Robert J. Sawyer&#8217;s             <em>Starplex<\/em>, a space adventure featuring Big Ideas,             superscience, intelligent dolphins, and some             fascinating alien species. We liked several things             about the novel: its Stapledonian scope, a different             approach to time travel, the dark matter chemistry, and             a sincere attempt to inject actual science into the             story. We liked the alien species, especially the dark             matter beings and the gestalt species. Several people             found many of the ideas derivative from Doc Smith,             David Brin, and <em>Star Trek.<\/em> We thought the             quality of the writng was below Sawyer&#8217;s usual             standards; some of the storytelling constructs were             confusing, there was a tendency to overexplain, and             none of the characters were interesting. We found the             book lent itself to an entertaining discussion. Thanks             to Elaine for hosting us!<\/p>\n<p><em>&#8212; A. T. Campbell, III<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Starplex by Robert J. Sawyer Attendees: Renee Babcock; A. T. Campbell, III; Fred Duarte, Jr.; Matthew Duarte, Cyndi Dunn; Emily Gamboa; Mona Gamboa; Ruben Gamboa; John Gibbons; Debbie Hodgkinson; Karen Meschke, Elaine Powell; Jeff Rupley; Willie Siros; Lori Wolf. We held the July 1 meeting in an unusual location &#8212; Elaine Powell&#8217;s pool. Last summer&#8217;s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1314","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1314"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1314\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1317,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1314\/revisions\/1317"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}