Noise

al Clement, the dean of hard science fiction, has written a new planetary adventure, the kind of story that made his reputation as a meticulous designer of worlds. These settings are utterly convincing because they are constructed from the ground up using established principles of science. Like his classic Mission of Gravity, Noise is part of a tradition of excellence dating back to the 1940s, for which Clement has been recognized as a Grand Master of SF by the Science Fiction Writers of America. Kainui is one of a pair of double planets circling a pair of binary stars. Mike Hoani has come there to study the language of the colonists, to analyze its evolution in the years since settlement. But Kainui is an ocean planet. The ocean is seventeen hundred miles deep, and there's no solid ground anywhere, so the population is scattered in cities on artificial floating islands with no fixed locations. The atmosphere isn't breathable, and lightning, waterspouts, and tsunamis are constant. Although settled by Polynesians, Kainui is anything but a tropical paradise. Mike's academic research turns into an exotic nautical adventure unlike anything he could have imagined.Clement, Hal is the author of 'Noise', published 2003 under ISBN 9780765308573 and ISBN 0765308576.