Heart of the Comet (ISBN 0553763415)

Captivating:
I'm from the Heinlein, Colin Wilson, Lovecraft wing of SF, but I really enjoyed this book. It would make a great movie.

Awesome Hard Science:
I enjoyed this book immensely! The perfect balance of exploring scientific concepts and telling a riveting story. Like "Earth" (novel by David Brin), some of the scientific ideas are a little farfetched, but not just silly. They are well thought out, and explained in relatively simple terms. There are explorations of biology (the interplay of hostile and symbiotic microscopic life forms - germs), astrophysics (using sublimation to steer a comet), and even the psycology (small groups of people under stress - a la "Lord of the Flies"). I think this is why it took two authors to write this book... there are just too many interesting concepts going on for just one person to have thouroughly researched. Oh, and did I mention that it has lots of action and a great story. Not nearly as dry as you might guess from the title - quite a treat.

didn't work for me:
to be fair, i have about 100 pages left at the time i an writing this. i bought this book because of the high recommendations here on amazon. i've been pretty disappointed from the start. the beginning og the book spent too much time trying to introduce the characters in what seemed to be outside the context of any interesting plot. the story is told from the 1st person of about 4 different people. at this point in the book, i haven't identified with any of the people nor are they realistic portails, even for hard sci-fi. one character has been making incredible bio advances and another can apparently hack into any computer system or through any sort of encryption --- with what seems like little or no effort and little or no resources. the tech + bio advancements made by the cometeers failed to grab my interest. on top of this, the book is quite long. it's not long because of a whole lot of content IMO, but rather because the story moves quite slowly. another aspect ... the book focuses a lot on the political strife between several human factions that were chosen for crew. it is very unbelievable that such intolerant inviduals would be packed together on a hundred year space mission. even to what seems to be the bitter end, the different factions are stabbing each other in the back in ways that are obviously undermining everyone's survival. it would have been much more realistic to me folks would have banded together in the face of adversity in order to survive.

Other Books:
Space tribe time. An expedition to explore a comet is not exactly filled with the most stable of individuals. This causes long term problems when they begin to use the giant ball of stuff as a space vehicle. When a virus strikes, atavistic tribal behaviour comes to the fore, and some of the more rational still among those on board struggle to keep things together.

Adventure science-fiction at it's literate best:
Ah, this was such a satisfying novel. It follows three primary characters over a century as they are part of the effort to study Halley's comet. They discover a primitive life-form which attatches itself to the humans in a symbiotic relationship and eventually causes them to be an imagined threat to Earth. The theme of genetically enhanced humans (Percells) and the rivalry between them and the normal humans is explored. Some consider this an overworked theme, but the authors here approach it from a logical perspective. This is a good read and quite recommended for science-fiction readers.