Charon's Ark

i bought this book way back in i believe 91' or 92' or was it 89' 90'? anyway it has everything a person could ask for! alian abductions, man-eating dinosaurs! yes! it was 96' or 97' that i picked it up again and reread it, my memory is so bad that it was almost new again! now here we are in 01' almost 02' and i just ran across it in one of my box o books and i'm gonna read it again! i thought i'd see if any new books have been put out by the author. i'm thinking that i'm not gonna get my hopes up for any other installments in the Charon series any time SOON!this is a great read. pick it up!

What do you get when you cross Michael Crichton with the Neal Simon? Rick Gauger, with better writing than Crichton! Now if Gauger just had the production capacity of Crichton, I could get a more regular fix. I have been reading the work of Rick Gauger for almost 25 years. He makes a wonderful blend of hard science fiction, great writing style, and silly situations ( plus sex, you gotta have some sex, right?). Charon's Ark has as its intriguing premise that Pluto and its moon Charon are not what they seem. They are in fact alien constructions not of this solar system. From this initial premise of an ecological ark built to last millions of years, Gauger spins out a boatload of ideas like I haven't enjoyed since I read Larry Niven's "Ringworld". And you know the writing has to be good if you end up rooting for the fat kid with acne ( the annoyer turned hero, Charlie) to get the girl. This is the book that would have been made into a dinosaur movie if Robert Zemeckis (Back To the Future) was directing instead of Steven Speilberg. I give the book 4 stars because the remaining 2 in the series may be even better, so I have to leave room for improvement. Plus he has been so darned slow in getting the other 2 out that I have to make my displeasure known somehow! But I hear the other two are almost done!

Having to live with him for upwards of 14 years, I think I've got my dear ol' dad (or Doddy) figured out. He puts a lot of himself into Charlie Freeman. I have always found this book to be incredibly funny, and a very good read. I can't wait for the trilogy.

Balzac said that there's no friend like a reader, and he was right. Thanks to everyone for favorable comments about Charon's Ark. Volumes 2 and 3 of the Charon's Ark tale are called Charon's Children and Charon Is Coming. I hate multi-volume sci-fi novels, but my publisher bribed me into wrapping up the story. All three volumes of the Charon's Ark "epic" contain all of my favorite things: Spaceships, aliens, robots, dinosaurs, brash adolescents, and sexy nice girls in their summer underthings. Read 'em and meet the Bigbirds, land a UFO in Seattle, shoot it out with the Proctor, watch Chela rob a bank and steal a truck, and see Eva not get what she deserves!

This is a creative and fast moving book, written 10 years ago, but still fun and worth reading. A planeload of mostly gifted high school students are alien jacked and sent off to crew the Ark of Charon, which has an admirable mission of preserving life forms. But, alas, there are flies in the ointment, from the Proctor, an evil computer program, to the existing crew, who are getting old and unreliable. What I particularly enjoyed were the characters, who so took me back to the old high school days. There was Eva, a narcissic empty minded teen who cared only about her nails and hair die. I knew people like that, and didn't like them then and didn't like Eva, either (interesting when a book is well written enough to make you dislike weak characters; this did). Charlie was my hero, saving mankind and himself in the process. Well written and fun, and worth reading even now. Funny, though how perceptions of computer use can so dramatically change in 10 years. See for yourself.