Mindbridge eBook Joe Haldeman
Download As PDF : Mindbridge eBook Joe Haldeman 
A remarkable alien technology could have devastating consequences for humanity in this novel by the Hugo and Nebula Award–winning author of The Forever War.
In the far future, the accidental scientific breakthrough known as the Levant-Meyer Translation changes everything. Suddenly people can leap instantaneously across the universe, albeit temporarily, enabling teams of Tamers to explore far-flung worlds and prepare them for possible human habitation. But one expedition doesn’t make it back alive.
Jacque Lefavre achieves his lifelong dream of becoming a Tamer when he joins the Agency for Extraterrestrial Development. On his first exploratory mission to a planet known as Groombridge, Lefavre and his team encounter something truly extraordinary a small, nonsentient creature that, when joined with another of its kind, creates a telepathic “bridge.” But exploiting this psychic link could bring unanticipated perils, for it is about to bring Lefavre and his team into dangerously close contact with the L’vrai, an ancient, advanced, and hostile race of star travelers—an encounter that could prove to be the first step in humankind’s salvation . . . or its doom.
This ebook features an illustrated biography of Joe Haldeman including rare images from the author’s personal collection.
In the far future, the accidental scientific breakthrough known as the Levant-Meyer Translation changes everything. Suddenly people can leap instantaneously across the universe, albeit temporarily, enabling teams of Tamers to explore far-flung worlds and prepare them for possible human habitation. But one expedition doesn’t make it back alive.
Jacque Lefavre achieves his lifelong dream of becoming a Tamer when he joins the Agency for Extraterrestrial Development. On his first exploratory mission to a planet known as Groombridge, Lefavre and his team encounter something truly extraordinary a small, nonsentient creature that, when joined with another of its kind, creates a telepathic “bridge.” But exploiting this psychic link could bring unanticipated perils, for it is about to bring Lefavre and his team into dangerously close contact with the L’vrai, an ancient, advanced, and hostile race of star travelers—an encounter that could prove to be the first step in humankind’s salvation . . . or its doom.
This ebook features an illustrated biography of Joe Haldeman including rare images from the author’s personal collection.
Mindbridge eBook Joe Haldeman
This is a great book -- fast moving & easy reading, but it gives the reader plenty to think about. IMHO this book is at least as good as "The Forever War," which definitely deserved the Hugo Award.The Kindle version of this book, however, is a disgrace! Too many typos (misspellings, mainly), but by far the most important screw-up is the omission of Chapter 53, "For They Shall Be Called the Children of God." Wow! Absolutely unbelievably sloppy work!!
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Mindbridge eBook Joe Haldeman Reviews
Great book, from a great writer and a fellow Vietnam Vet! I plan to read more of Joe's work in the future. I also enjoyed the pictures he included. When I got evacuated for the last time and on to Japan all my pic' s.
that I had were lost forever in a duffle bag in Phang Rang. R.V.N. so the pics meant something to me.
Tom
This doesn't feel like a book, but as the idea for a book, something waiting for a good editor to take the reins of the situation and stir the well meaning author in the best direction. Some of the ideas are very good, like the concept of specially trained people who explore new planets in advanced space suits. They pretty much signoff their lives to the Agency, and consent to all kinds of dangerous and perplexing expeditions. There's also a very interesting and original version of instantaneous transport. Slightly less original but still interesting is the idea of alien organisms that can form a mental bridge between people, which unfortunately was used in the book mostly for sex purposes (and here that editor I mentioned would have been welcome). The bad is the encounter and dealings with other aliens, which was pretty terrible overall.
The style didn't jive with me either together with diary entries and regular exposition, we have snippets of reports, scientific papers, and other, sometimes incomprehensible stuff. I only skimmed through it because I found it irritating.
Joe Haldeman's Mindbridge is a mashup of two poorly developed concepts that almost make up a good story. Interstellar travel, albeit transitory, opens the door for planetary exploration that identifies a unique species of life with the ability to form a "mindbridge" between individuals such that mind reading is possible. At the same time, an intelligent alien presence is encountered where communications is all but impossible and seems on a collision course with Earth.
Haldeman creates quite a bit of appealing conceptualizations including the mindbridge and an alien intelligence that cannot communicate with humans, along with a novel form of interstellar travel that is instantaneous, but transitory in nature. The resulting exploitation of this phenomenon is a pioneer spirit of exploration to study and then geoform receptive planets for eventual human migration. Conveniently, the mindbridge creature allows for a last desperate attempt at communication that averts total disaster.
The tale suffers from several issues. In this future, human life is pretty cheap with the pioneers experiencing a high fatality rate. In the case of the mindbridge creature, first contact is eventually lethal, while subsequent contact leads to a weaker, but nonfatal mindbridge. As a result, individuals who wish to commit suicide are recruited to "charge" the creature. Because of the unique properties of interstellar travel, women are recruited to function as "breeders" on the distant worlds as this is the only way to establish early colonies, but there is a cavalier attitude by both genders to this arrangement and the children are merely handed off to others to raise. As such, this future society seems a bit off kilter.
I'd give this 3.5 stars, but in the absence of "half-stars", let it be three.
I feel funny writing this about a book which has apparently achieved a status of a classic, but the book is, while well-written, nevertheless poorly-constructed, and thus fails as a unified work. And I _don't_ mean its breakdown into chapters that are presented as various documents (regular third-person narration, excerpts from autobiography, personnel reports, excerpts from history/scientific works, technical memos with graphs and tables, etc.). All of this is perfectly fine and interesting to peruse.
The thing is, I think the writer has concocted one book from what had apparently been notes for two different books. One of those (the bridge part), he didn't know how to give a coherent ending to; the other one (the aggressive aliens) didn't seem expandable into a full-length book (would have been good for a short story). But, apparently, he had to submit something according to the contract with this publisher (again, funny, talking about this 40 years after the fact), and thus was "Mindbridge" born.
Unfortunately, this disjointedness, and thus, the imminence of a very hollow ending, doesn't become apparent until about 50 pages from said ending. The reader gets engrossed by a well-developed story framework (of the first proto-book) and by Haldeman's writing chops, which are undeniable. But then practically the whole plot of the "bridges" gets crumpled to a mere instrument to be used in mind communication with the second-part aliens and is never mentioned again; the explanation for how the bridges came into being and what they are is given in what I consider the crudest evidence of the author's laziness—a chapter titled "Crystal Ball I", where the reader is just given a succint account of how, several hundred years into the future, a certain person found out this and that. Way to slap the reader with a half-baked wrap-up of a long-developed elaborate story. Of these Crystal Balls, there are two. The second one, titled "Crystral Ball II" (sic, typo in the hardcover edition), consists of a part that didn't need to be a crystal ball, since it's not several hundred years into the future but rather still within the main character's lifespan (and should have been split into several "newsclips" or "personnel reports" if the book's character were to be preserved; at the same time, there is a chapter which needn't have been there and its content would have been perfectly good in form of a couple of lines in a crystal-ball-format chapter), and a second part which is too much of a crystal ball because it gives a hurried and overly general wrap-up of the whole story while the book still hasn't ended.
And of course, a SF book that delves too deep into the subject of the substance of being human can't but incorporate the topic of God or gods. This is done twice the first time in the first Crystal Ball, and those gods seem to be token presences that are there only because the word "G/g/od" is supposed to be impressive; and the second time in the very last chapter, where it also doesn't make either sense, or rhyme, or reason.
Disappointed. Have been misled by a couple of reviews that touted this as one of the greatest SF books of all time. Nope. It's not a book that won't be thrown out once I have no more space on my bookshelves.
This is a great book -- fast moving & easy reading, but it gives the reader plenty to think about. IMHO this book is at least as good as "The Forever War," which definitely deserved the Hugo Award.
The version of this book, however, is a disgrace! Too many typos (misspellings, mainly), but by far the most important screw-up is the omission of Chapter 53, "For They Shall Be Called the Children of God." Wow! Absolutely unbelievably sloppy work!!
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