Unknown title/author

[Mookishboy]

hi all
I read a book quite a few years ago and i think it may have been a series.
It starts of with the tale of a guy who is minding some technology on earth that has fallen from tech, whether this is by design or accident i cant remember.
but it seems that humanity had an interstellar empire/confederation at some point in history and used dumbell shaped ships.
in this book or another one in the series the protaganist discovers that the dimension the ships travel in or the engine or something is sentient.

does that ring any bells?
for some reason i alwas think of carles sheffield when i try to come up with the author

Cheers in advance
M

[tedstriker]

Venus on the Half Shell covers a lot of ground (and a lot of Sci-Fi tropes), so it may be a red herring. But that said:

It's the story of a man named Simon who is the sole survivor of the cleansing of the Earth by a second flood. He finds a spaceship and decides to leave the planet in search of answers. The ship extracts the power needed for FTL travel by sucking the life out of sentient stars in another dimension. Simon travels to a series of planets, and winds up trapped on a dumbbell-shaped planet when the last of the other-dimensional stars is drained of life.

Within the book Simon describes several stories in a fictional science fiction series about a wheelchair-bound spaceman. That, or the serial nature of the story could lead you to remember it as a series... Also, the author (at least originally) went by the pen name "Kilgore Trout", the name of a character created by Kurt Vonnegut that shows up in several of his books - I could see how that could make someone think "series" too. Almost forgot! At the beginning or end of the book there's a long list of other books Trout supposedly wrote - yet another possible reason.

[Mookishboy]

I found it !!!!
The Trigon Disunity
Michael P. Kube-McDowell
Here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trigon_Disunity)

go me :)