I recently became aware of this series, consisting of four books:

World Building by Stephen Gillett (which I ordered and am reading)

Aliens and Alien Societies by Stanley Schmidt (which I'm considering ordering)

Space Travel by Ben Bova

Time Travel by Paul Nahin

My question, and the purpose of his thread, is to ask if anyone here has read any of these and what they thought? I'm particularly interested in opinions on the second book I list, since I'm considering ordering it next.

These books came out in 1996, so I'm sure some of their information is now out of date, considering the new things we have learned in the last 13 years about astronomy, but I think they're probably still useful.

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"True genius shudders at incompleteness, and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be." - Edgar Allen Poe

There are so many free online sources about worldbuilding, etc. that paying good money for books about those subjects is slightly puzzing. Many, many RPG, scifi and fantasy sites and blogs contain all sorts of how-to and comments from experts and talented amateurs.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

sound intersting ....nice post tnx to share..

I seem to recall Harlan's World, which was a shared universe from the eighties.

/smirk mode on.
Sharing was big a counter culture thing in the 1980's just like the information super highway of the 90's and adding twenty to front of the dates in the twenty-ohs-somethings.

/smirk mode off.

Medea: Harlan's World.

With stories by such slackers as Jack Williamson, Larry Niven, Fred Pohl, Hal Clement, Tom Disch, Frank Herbert, Poul Anderson, Kate Wilhelm, Ted Sturgeon and Robert Silverberg.

How ancient. How not-with-it.

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If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.

I liked it.

For the OP how about wikinovel?

I have and have read Space Travel. I thought it was good and a worthwhile read, though a lot of the information could now be found online. I also disagree with some of the author's positions, such as that on terraforming. He basically states that terraforming is a bad idea (if you want an earth-like environment, stay on earth or do it in an orbital). It seemed over-generalized to me.

Recommended despite criticisms.

BB

Hmmm. Seems the main flaw in this line of thinking is that a space station limits the size and diversity of your ecosystem. While space structures can in theory be made very big, it'll take an awfully long time before they can match the scale and complexity of a whole planet's potential biosystem, if it's even possible in practice.

Better to do both-- have planetary and space-based life systems. More redundant, more diverse, and able to survive a wider range of potential problems.

And of course, staying on Earth only works if nothing happens to Earth.

__________________
"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort