I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I absolutely adore first contact stories. They almost invariably disappoint me, but the idea of them thrills me nonetheless. This one is OK, or just about. Gunn apparently wrote this as an attempt to outdo Sagan's "Contact" which he considered romanticized and unrealistic, but of course that purpose makes the quality of this story's purported realism very vulnerable to our scrutiny... and it really doesn't hold up. As is common in first contact stories, where the author's imagination fails to give us something that feels real is in the realm of human and social interaction, rather than in the realm of the hard sci fi elements (although they of course overlap throughout). That the invention found in the pages of a forgotten second hand book would usher in an era of "free" energy might make us both sad and amused, considering the abundance of solar energy that awaits our development and attention, if only economic and corporate interests would get out of the way. Just for example. And in this story, such glaring missteps just get too distracting to enjoy the complicated alien plot. But I liked the grand scope and ambition of the ideas, even though they ultimately were overshadowed by poor representation of the human/social/economic elements.

This is interesting, hard science fiction with the requisite element of irony. My rating 4.0.
The author takes an engaging look at man’s quest to reach and explore the stars. It did not strike me as six novellas but as a continuing work.

Adrian Mast is a disillusioned aerospace engineer who left his ‘going nowhere’ job and opened his own consulting business. He comes upon a strange book at a local bookstore he likes to browse. The title is “Gift From the Stars” and in the appendix are what Adrian believes to be viable spacecraft designs. He questions the bookstore owner, Frances, about the author and publisher and her research reveals more mystery.

Adrian and Frances set off to find the author whom they locate in a mental institute. Peter is brilliant but paranoid as a result of his view of the alien ‘gift. Adrian and Frances trick a government bureaucrat into pursing the ‘alien’ plans for a remarkable energy source. The result ushers in a worldwide era of peace with free energy. From there, Adrian and Frances, joined by a young woman who was sent as a spy but becomes caught up in their quest, continue the goal of building the spaceship. They pull together a small team who build the ship and head into space. Although they hope to find the aliens they think invited them through the gift, they are a little surprised when they discover that Peter has programmed the computer to take the ship on the alien path. Along the way they are caught in a wormhole time warp which they have to escape. When they arrive to the apparent destination, there are many other ships, but no welcoming committee. Again they must explore to uncover the puzzles of the mysterious planet.

The story is engaging although a bit strange. It has a certain believability and kept my interest. The ending might be considered a bit of a letdown but it seemed an appropriate ‘landing’ for the author’s apparent purpose. The author manages to present differing views of man’s fear and boldness when faced with the possibilities of exploring space. Through the adventure there are different reactions, reluctance and dreams. I felt the ending left me, the reader, contemplating my feelings about the opportunities and experience of space exploration. I would recommend this to readers who enjoy hard science fiction with an appropriate amount of irony and humor.

This is an average science fiction story, told in 6 short novellas.
Unfortunately some are better than others.
The ending left me feeling cheated with lots of unanswered questions.

A Great Read in and interesting style. The books skips forward to different periods of the same characters allowing for developments to take place off screen as it were, which creates a great read as you fill in the gaps of what has happened.

James Gunn strikes again, with a series of linked novellas that add up to a really interesting book. You'll enjoy it.

I was pleased to see this book from James Gunn, whose previous works I have read and enjoyed, but I was disappointed with this one. To start with, it is composed of 6 novelettes which appeared separately in Analog over a period of years. This does not, as the author claims in the preface, make it a novel in 6 parts, it makes it a series of linked stories and thus in each story the heroes meet and overcome a series of obstacles with absurd ease so that a satisfactory ending may be achieved in the length of a novelette.
It is necessary, in many science fiction stories, to suspend disbelief so that for the duration of the book one may accept for example space warps or teleportation or any other plot device which flies in the face of known science. It should not be necessary to have to accept gaping holes in the plot or events which fly in the face of common sense. In this book a spaceship is built from plans received from an alien source and the time comes for its initial test flight. Would you, in these circumstances, provision it for a 5 year flight with a crew of 220 when all you had planned was a short trip? No, neither would I.

The novel is one of the earliest samples of Gunn's writing before he hit it big and became a screen-writer and eventually directed movies as awesome as Guardians of the Galaxy (1 & 2). However, don't fret if you haven't had the chance to read Gift From The Stars. It's merely a noteworthy passing along the road of a successful writer, like J.K Rowling's Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them, Beadle the Bard, and Peter F. Hamilton's Watching Trees Grow.

As the blurb and all the various blogs have already told you, the novel tells a story about humanity's first contact with aliens. The execution Gunn decided to take may be a bit frowned upon since it's not a gripping read or filled with scenes that could make you want to pay more attention. However, the subject matter will always remain a favorite to many sci fi writers and readers alike.

Gift From The Stars is "okay" in a sense of most probably displaying Gunn's vision for his movies dotted down on black and white.

This is what sci-fi is about, thought provoking stories steeped in plausibility. In “Gift from the Stars”, James Gunn, the author, put together a story that left me contemplating the plausibility of the events. After reading the book description on Amazon, I wasn’t sure how well six short stories would fit together. It was perfect and the right way to handle this discovery journey to an alien star system. Each subsequent short story took place a short time after the previous short story ended. This had the effect of making the whole story believable as space is vast with the result that in system travel times would be long.

The main characters were an engineer, a book store matron, a young attractive female investigator, and a schizophrenic computer programmer. As different as these characters are, Gunn orchestrated them into the story in a symbiotic way. From the characters’ backgrounds, you can see that the main characters have the skills for space ship construction, research, intrigue dealing, and imagination. All of these skills came into play in the story creating a nonlinear story line. Nonlinearity is part of the reason for the story’s plausibility. The road to the successful accomplishment of space flight will not be a straight line. Major engineering endeavors like this are steeped in politics, financing, and scientific obstacles.

This was an engrossing read. But, to be overly critical, the ending was a letdown. After a dramatic debate among the main characters as to whether they should stay with the aliens to learn more about the universe, the last sentence merely said that they went home, back to earth. Well, I need to know what happened when they got there; where they well received; was the knowledge made available to the public or was it suppressed by the government?

This book carries itself as a standalone book but would be a great foundation for a sequel.

More for my classic scifi reading. Apparently the author found Contact (particularly the movie) to be too hokey and preposterous, hence this...his deliberately realistic view at how we might encounter aliens. Gunn is a prolific author who has been around for a long time and he writes like a pro, the novellas comprising this slender volume read well and easily and to his credit there is a certain degree of realism maintained, it's all precision written low key. I must admit the first story really engaged me the way subsequent ones didn't quite, but the entire intergalactic journey was a compelling trip and pretty fun. The characters had their various quirky appeals, particularly the enormously charming Mrs. Farmstead. Is this a credible story of a first contact? Sure, yeah, in a way. It certainly presents a possibility, then again at this time possibilities, whether scientifically postulated or imagined by science fiction, are all that's available. It's an interesting theory, an entertaining read and a quick one and definitely worth the time for genre fans. Thanks Netgalley.

Gift From the Stars by James Gunn- Is There Anyone Out There? And what if they send us detailed plans to help us find our own way to the stars? As he says in his preface, James Gunn takes the premise of Carl Sagan's Contact and turns it around. What if some people don't want the Alien's help. It starts with a book found in a remainder pile in a neighborhood book store. An aerospace engineer finds drawings and details that look realistic to him and begins a quest to find the author, publisher, etc, setting off alarms at government agencies. The novel is a collection of six novelettes first published in Analog magazine and later by Easton Press. James Gunn is in top form here, still writing after 60 years in Science Fiction, and still with exciting informative stories to tell.

This 2005 novel is a fix-up of five linked novellas originally published in Analog Magazine from 1999 through 2005. Those original five novellas were reworked into six chapters. The novel is now being re-released in hardcover by Reputation Books on May 30, 2017. I received a kindle format version at no cost, in return for publishing an honest review.
James Gunn is SFFWA Grand Master as of 2007, and I have previously read his novel The Listeners (1972). In his introduction, Gunn says that he got favorable comments on The Listeners from Carl Sagan. After Sagan released his novel Contact (1985), Gunn decided he could do the same subject more realistically. This is his response to Contact.
Hard-sf is primarily a literature of ideas, with real or at least plausible science and technology. All three of The Listeners, Contact, and Gift from the Stars are hard-sf dealing with the search for alien intelligence. On the other hand, mundane fiction and even many sub-genre of science fiction deal primarily with characters and their outward and/or inward experience. In my opinion, the best hard-sf plays in both areas at the same time. Unfortunately, Gift from the Stars comes down heavily lopsided on the side of ideas. The dialog is awkward, often the author is speaking transparently to the reader through the words of the characters. The voices of the characters are almost indistinguishable, except that once in while we are reminded that Frances is determined, Jessie is skeptical, Adrian leads, and Peter is crazy.
The concepts of Gift from the Stars are central. Running through the first five chapters, is the mystery of why. Why would an alien civilization go to the trouble of sending us plans for a starship? When Gunn’s explanation finally arrives, it takes up almost the entire last chapter and it is quite involved - covering 2 billion years, relating to interactions between alien species, and accounting for dark matter and dark energy. I don’t want to say too much about it, as that would spoil the puzzle. But, in the end I felt it was overly complex and unlikely. Taking a quick jab at string theory as “as far-out as the supernatural”, does not justify that any other theory is just as likely. There is math behind string theory, at least. I feel that the final explanation while interesting, does not measure up to the high bar set by Gunn in his introduction, where he says Contact was romantic and unrealistic.
So, in the end, I felt this novel is entertaining hard-sf for the idea-oriented reader, but not especially noteworthy. Indeed, it would not take much to pick apart the speculations.

Told as a series of short stories Gift From the Stars caught and held my attention from the first episode. The gift is plans for a interstellar space ship and each episode follows the characters as they work to first build the ship. Then it follows them as they journey and arrive. This is hard science fiction with a side of character development. Not a long story but an interesting one that left me wondering at the end and for me that is a mark of a good story.

I received a free copy of the book in return for an honest review.