Book Review: Heaven's Shadow

Heaven's Shadow, by David S. Goyer and Michael Cassutt,  is a First Contact story along the lines of Rendezvous with Rama II, Spindrift, or Eon. It's also the second book I've read recently where the fact there's a Big Dumb Object is called out within the pages in a nice meta kind of way.

In Heaven's Shadow, book one of a trilogy, just as two crews from different space agencies land on the surface of Near-Earth Object (NEO) Keanu, it changes course and enters earth-orbit, blatantly confirming that it's a ship and not an asteroid. The crews decide to explore, and discover a changing inner chamber complete with ...well that'd be a spoiler wouldn't it?

SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE all the promotional material reads. That kind of jaded my reading for maybe the first fourth of the book. As I read, I kept thinking things like, "How will this be filmed?" "This might be left out in a movie." "That'd look cool in a movie." After awhile, though, I stopped and just enjoyed the story.

My only real complaint about the story is that I couldn't keep straight some of the very minor characters and their relationships. Who the heck were Amy's parents and where were they?

Apart from that, Heaven's Shadow was a fun look inside NASA's operations when the book gets tossed out the window.

Heaven's Shadow should be available July 5, 2011.