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Title: Barely literate.
Review: One of the first things any (halfway decent) writer of fiction will tell you is that the most fundamental rule is "Don't tell me, show me." Aldrin and Barnes spend an inordinate amount of time in detailed explanations of technology, history, and motivation, and precious little showing their characters in action. "Encounter..." reads more like a premise for a book than real fiction, and the prose is among the worst I have ever seen published. It is difficult to believe that John Barnes, the man responsible for the wildly imaginative (if occasionally banal) "Mother of Storms," among other competently-written novels, had anything to do with this; I would be embarassed to have my name associated with it in any way. Forget the plot; the "first encounter" scenario has been done so many times, in so many ways, and so often better than it is done here that there is no point to reading this. No point at all.
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