James Nicoll Reviews

John Brunner’s 1974 Total Eclipse is a stand-alone hard-SF puzzle story.

After the disappointments at Proxima, Epsilon Eridani, and Tau Ceti, humans might have abandoned interstellar flight altogether. The 2020 discovery of alien ruins on the moon of a life-bearing planet orbiting Sigma Draconis saved the dream of interstellar exploration…

At least for a while. The 2028 expedition may be the final expedition.

Humans missed meeting the Draconians by a scant hundred thousand years. What little can be deduced from their ruins is impressive: the Draconians went from stone age to technological triumph in half the time humans took. Then, for reasons unknown, the entire species vanished.

The handful of researchers on-planet have yet to unravel the mystery. Fodder for paranoia on divided Earth. Perhaps the scientists have uncovered an alien superweapon that the rich nations are keeping concealed from Earth’s impoverished nations! After UN outcry, General Jose Maria Ordoñez-Vico of the Bolivian Military Intelligence Service is dispatched to Sigma Draconis to determine if the scientists are lying.

The scientists’ initial impressions of the General are not favorable. However, even if it turns out that the General is an honest man willing to accept the truth that the researchers have not made much progress, his report will not deal with the true problem. Unravelling the facts behind the aliens’ rise and fall from the fragmentary evidence left after a thousand centuries of decay is an almost impossible task. And the authorities on Earth may not accept a truthful report.

Whatever the scientists do manage to discover may be cold comfort as humans on Earth stumble towards their own doom.

~oOo~

In some ways, this reads like a do-over of Brunner’s1968 Bedlam Planet. Both books are set in the Sigma Draconis system. Both are set in an era when qua-space-based faster-than-light travel is possible but prohibitively expensive. In both, discoveries at Sigma Draconis come as a welcome surprise after a series of disappointments at closer star systems [1]. Also, some events in this book parallel events in the earlier work. I have a vague memory that Brunner addressed the parallels in an essay, but I cannot remember the title or where it appeared. Suggestions in comments?

A significant difference between the two books is that Bedlam Planet focused on human survival on an alien world, while Total Eclipse complicates matters by introducing the archaeological and scientific puzzle presented by the Draconians. Because this expedition is not a deliberate colonization effort, the scientists’ efforts are almost completely focused on the Draconians and what can be deduced from their relics and such close relatives as still survive.

A more profound difference is that Total Eclipse is fundamentally a more pessimistic book than Bedlam Planet. Many SF novels cheerfully pepper their setting with an abundance of alien civilizations, never asking why, if Earthlike worlds regularly produce advanced civilizations, none of them colonized Earth in the distant past. This novel provides a two-fold answer: the Great Filter that dooms civilizations is intelligence itself, and nobody lasts long enough to solve the problems inherent in settling on alien worlds.

Although some of the methods used to try to unravel the mystery are eyebrow-raising (to put it mildly) Brunner does his best to present a genuine mystery resolved reasonably plausibly, in the context of scientific and linguistic knowledge available to British authors of the early 1970s. The answers are depressing, but I suppose it’s hard to have an upbeat answer to why a species went extinct [2].

The characters are functional examples of Brunner’s usual dramatis personae, but are not so interesting as to be mentioned by name. While it takes almost a decade to arrive at a convincing explanation for the Draconians’ demise, the book itself is only 206 pages long (in my aged DAW MMPB). The plot moves along briskly. The result is one of Brunner’s more intriguing works.

Total Eclipse is available here (Amazon US), here (Amazon Canada), here (Amazon UK), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Kobo).

I did not find Total Eclipse at Apple Books or at troubled Chapters-Indigo. However, searching for a book titled Total Eclipse in a year when there is going to be a total eclipse in North America is not necessarily straightforward and I might have missed it.

1: The two books I discuss here mention many of the same named systems. Difference: it’s Proxima in this novel and the entire Alpha Centauri system in Bedlam Planet.

2: OK, maybe City put forth a reason for humans going extinct. And depending on what you think happened at the end, Childhood’s End. And of course, Locklands. OK, maybe it’s surprisingly easy. Ah, nobody reads footnotes. I am not changing my assertion.