Professional Programming Concepts Book

This is a soft SF novel, read as a Buddy Read in Hugo & Nebula Awards: Best Novels group. The book was Hugo award nominee in 1962.

The story starts with an interesting and quite rare premise: the space is deadly, there is no hope for interplanetary travel, even less for interstellar. Since this news, that shaken the world a century has passed and a new mode of travel emerges (here the soft part) – psychokinetic. No one believed in psy-powers but a company named Fishhook persisted and was finally successful. They send consciousness of psy-operators with marvelous machines many light years away.

The protagonist is one of such operators, Shepherd Blaine meets an alien intelligence in one of such travels and it states: “Hi, pal. I trade with you my mind.” Back to Earth, Blaine tries to run off for who can tell what Fishhook will do with such an invader.

The starting ideas are quite promising, but as story progresses I found it a bit too filled with coincidences and lucky strikes from the helping alien mind, which aren’t followed with investigation of these new great powers.