The Sky People, S. M. Stirling
The Sky People, S. M. Stirling
6 Rating(s)
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The Sky People

Author: S. M. Stirling

Narrator: Todd McLaren

Unabridged: 10 hr 38 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 01/01/2007


Synopsis

Marc Vitrac was born in Louisiana in the early 1960's, about the time the first interplanetary probes delivered the news that Mars and Venus were teeming with life—even human life. At that point, the "Space Race" became the central preoccupation of the great powers of the world.

Now, in 1988, Marc has been assigned to Jamestown, the US-Commonwealth base on Venus, near the great Venusian city of Kartahown. Set in a countryside swarming with sabertooths and dinosaurs, Jamestown is home to a small band of American and allied scientist-adventurers.

But there are flies in this ointment—and not only the Venusian dragonflies, with their yard-wide wings. The biologists studying Venus's life are puzzled by the way it not only resembles that on Earth, but is virtually identical to it. The EastBloc has its own base at Cosmograd, in the highlands to the south, and relations are frosty. And attractive young geologist Cynthia Whitlock seems impervious to Marc's Cajun charm.

Meanwhile, at the western end of the continent, Teesa of the Cloud Mountain People leads her tribe in a conflict with the Neanderthal-like beastmen who have seized her folk's sacred caves. Then an EastBloc shuttle crashes nearby, and the beastmen acquire new knowledge... and AK47's.

Jamestown sends its long-range blimp to rescue the downed EastBloc cosmonauts, little suspecting that the answer to the jungle planet's mysteries may lie there, among tribal conflicts and traces of a power that made Earth's vaunted science seem as primitive as the tribesfolk's blowguns. As if that weren't enough, there's an enemy agent on board the airship...

Extravagant and effervescent, The Sky People is alternate-history SF adventure at its best.

About S. M. Stirling

S. M. Stirling is the author of numerous science fiction and fantasy novels, including the popular Nantucket series that began with Island in the Sea of Time and, more recently, Dies the Fire and The Protector's War. A former lawyer and an amateur historian, he lives in the Southwest with his wife, Jan.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Bookwraiths on October 28, 2015

Originally reviewed at Bookwraiths. What if Mars and Venus had been living worlds just like ours? And what if humans discovered this at the start of the Cold War space race? Would the U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. still squabble over the Korean Peninsula and Vietnam, or would they set there sites and space rock......more

Goodreads review by Duffy on September 08, 2012

More and more, I'm thinking of Stirling as a guy who makes mediocre books out of really cool ideas. Here, an alien race terraformed Venus and Mars a couple of million years ago. It made a kind of zoo out of Venus, populating it with all sorts of Earth critters, and then setting up a sentinel for obs......more

Goodreads review by Anne on June 22, 2011

***** "The Sky People" are explorers from Earth, on the first two nearby American and Russian settlements in an alternate 1988. S.M. Stirling creates a heroic space-western style adventure, with ambiguity of motivations to show humans/ aliens may be not strictly evil. Colorful vivid Venus has danger......more

Goodreads review by Troy on April 29, 2008

The Sky People starts out with an interesting concept, that Venus and Mars are inhabitable planets and teaming with life. I liked the alternate history view of space exploration by the US and Russians to explore these new worlds in the 1980s . It makes you think about what kind of space exploration......more

Goodreads review by Charles on July 26, 2008

This one was good, but more space opera to me than Sword and Planet. I liked it but it didn't have the power of "In the Courts of the Crimson Kings."......more