booklurker
February 23rd, 2011, 08:20 PM
The key detail is that the book begins when the Earth's sky suddenly reverses to become a mirror image of the planet's surface. For example, telescopes have become useless for their intended purpose but can now zoom in on the reflections of foreign continents.
Other details are:
The protagonist is a teenage boy at the beginning of the novel. He's rather disenfranchised, having no mother around, having to deal with his paranoid father's depression not responding well to lithium treatment, bullies and finds himself not too impressed by his first sexual experience with a girl that happens to take place in an unfinished house if I recall correctly.
As an adult he takes an opportunity to join a clandestine space exploration program. Rather than traveling in space ships (which might be impossible because of the changes in the sky,) scientists have discovered a way to teleport a human conscious into alien lifeforms located on planets around the galaxy.
Our man finds some of these new astronauts gorging themselves with food before being teleported into creatures with life-cycles similar to mayflies, larvae that eat, morph into adults and live a short time on stored energy reserves only to reproduce and die.
The protagonist himself is sent to a planet where life is arranged in a form unlike any life on earth. Mindless drones are telepathically linked over a short distance to a body that is little more than a massively over-sized brain with stunted, atrophied limbs.
There he begins a terse, conflicted romantic relationship with a fellow astronaut, again, been years since I've read this.
Hoping someone out there can identify this from memory or has better google-fu than myself.
Other details are:
The protagonist is a teenage boy at the beginning of the novel. He's rather disenfranchised, having no mother around, having to deal with his paranoid father's depression not responding well to lithium treatment, bullies and finds himself not too impressed by his first sexual experience with a girl that happens to take place in an unfinished house if I recall correctly.
As an adult he takes an opportunity to join a clandestine space exploration program. Rather than traveling in space ships (which might be impossible because of the changes in the sky,) scientists have discovered a way to teleport a human conscious into alien lifeforms located on planets around the galaxy.
Our man finds some of these new astronauts gorging themselves with food before being teleported into creatures with life-cycles similar to mayflies, larvae that eat, morph into adults and live a short time on stored energy reserves only to reproduce and die.
The protagonist himself is sent to a planet where life is arranged in a form unlike any life on earth. Mindless drones are telepathically linked over a short distance to a body that is little more than a massively over-sized brain with stunted, atrophied limbs.
There he begins a terse, conflicted romantic relationship with a fellow astronaut, again, been years since I've read this.
Hoping someone out there can identify this from memory or has better google-fu than myself.