Without reading one page of Encounter with Tiber, you know that this book will sell a lot of copies simply on the basis of the first author's name. What sort of drama can Buzz Aldrin, who can call upon decades of technical expertise and experience, weave along with science fiction author John Barnes? The result is an intriguing story full of interesting concepts, many of which will look familiar to readers, but falls short in many aspects of plot and narrative.
    In the early years of the next century, only a few years from now, the American space program is slowly growing. After the shuttle Endeavour crashes in the Atlantic in a launch abort, the U. S. is forced to become more innovate in its efforts to maintain its presence in space to keep up with other countries, in particular China, which has emerged as America's (and Europe's, Russia's, and Japan's) adversarial superpower.
    This development receives an unexpected jolt when scientists, including astronauts on the International Space Station, discover a signal coming from Alpha Centauri. Decoded, it reveals that aliens visited the solar system thousands of years ago, and points to settlements they left on the Moon and Mars. The race is then quickly underway to find these settlements and look for repositories of knowledge left behind that may provide humankind with the key to the stars.
    Aldrin and Barnes lace a number of interesting, even provocative scientific and engineering ideas into the novel. Those who have followed many of the proposals for spacecraft to reach orbit, the Moon, and Mars, will see versions of these presented here (including Aldrin's own idea for "cycler" spacecraft to travel from Earth to Mars and back repeatedly: one of the cyclers in the novel is immodestly but appropriately named "Aldrin"). It's great to see these ideas reach a wider audience this book will have, provided readers don't simply dismiss these as mere fictional concepts.
    Unfortunately, great engineering ideas alone do not make a great science fiction, or any other kind, of novel. Aldrin and Barnes get carried away with introducing new spacecraft or technologies, and will spend several pages describing them. After going through the whole description (which in many cases includes technical illustrations, unusual for a novel but appropriate here) the reader is left wondering, "Now just where were we?" The plot is often lost in the midst of these technical descriptions. Some authors, like Tom Clancy, can get away with this because the latter part of his novels feature non-stop, can't-put-this-book-down action and suspense which is often set up by the technical descriptions earlier in the book. This is not the case here, however.
    The plot itself is also disappointing, with a number of problems. In the first thirty pages of the novel, we find the authors have completely scrambled the method of naming discovered asteroids, misspelled the name of a major science and engineering school (which happens to be the reviewer's alma mater!) and open a plot hole by describing a television camera crew filming the splashdown of the Endeavour -- while noting a few pages before the shuttle was ditching into the Atlantic Ocean at night. Other problems, not necessarily as major, appear elsewhere in the novel.
    There are also problems with characters in the novel. Some characters hyped up as major players, like Sig Jarlsbourg, the entrepreneur seeking to promote space tourism and colonization, play only a minor role in the novel, mostly to help develop the major players. The Tiberians themselves, whose account of their presence on Earth nearly 10,000 years ago takes up a major portion of the novel, turn out to be disappointingly humanlike. Replace their names and anatomical descriptions with human ones and in most cases they will seem convincingly human.
    As stated at the beginning of the review, this book will succeed based in large part on the author himself. Those looking for a novel packed with lots of good speculative ideas on future spacecraft and science will also find Encounter with Tiber rewarding. However, if you're looking for a well-paced novel with an intriguing plot and interesting characters, Encounter with Tiber will sadly disappoint.