Notes taken from my first blog entry...

I like to do things chronologically, but I can't go back to the 1980's. So I'll go back a couple of months so that I can build up a few posts. These two I will put together because they are the same story. Sheffield wrote The Nimrod Hunt (1986) first, then added one story line and changed the ending a bit to get The Mind Pool (1993). Without putting any spoilers in, I'll try to describe the book. He created a universe where humans have started to explore space, and have found three alien races. The races that humanity has met are totally peaceful, so peaceful in fact that the concept of killing another sentient being is painful for them.

Of course humanity is worried about threats from unexplored regions and is developing a way to protect ourselves. Esro Mondrian starts a project, based at a station in the Oort cloud to develop an artificial intelligent ship/being/weapon that will expand our sphere of known space, and protect us if need be. It gets loose, some people die. A council of the four races decides that a team, one member of each of the four races, will go after the device. I'm not going to go any further. It's set up to be like a Frankenstein's monster, but is it really? There is the interplay between the four races. Exploring Mondrian's psyche. Following the teams that they send after the device.

It was definitely an enjoyable book, rather, both were enjoyable. I wouldn't go out and pay full price for the second one, but I'm sure I picked these up at the used book store, so I'm OK. I think I liked his Proteus novels slightly more. Those are getting foggy in my memory, I read Proteus Unbound and Sight of Proteus in 2001, but I do remember that I thought they were fantastic.