A Wreath of Stars - Bob Shaw

A Wreath of Stars features Gilbert Snook, a man thinks of himself as a human neutrino, keeping to himself, avoiding society and any kind of involvement with people if he can help it, but ironically, it's the discovery of an anti-neutrino planet that puts him at the centre of a grand scientific discovery.

Unhappy with having to flee the previous African nation where he was employed as an aircraft engineer against his will, Snook finds himself in a difficult position working as a teacher in the state of Barandi for workers in the diamond mines that are the lifeblood of the nation. His world is turned upside down by the discovery of ghosts in the mine who have been made visible through the use of special glasses devised to work in darkness. It turns out to be a whole world in another dimension inside the earth who have been shifted out of their normal orbit by the approach of Thornton's Planet, a recently discovered anti-neutrino mass that has passed close by Earth.

With the assistance of an ambitious astronomer and director of a planetarium Boyce Ambrose looking to find fame for making a great scientific discovery, Gil and a small team manage to make contact with the ghostly inhabitants of Avernus through Gil's latent telepathic ability to warn them of further danger to come from the orbital pull of Thornton's Planet. Meanwhile, the President and the military of Barandi have other plans - not necessarily the same - that have been disrupted by this discovery, not least the closure of the diamond mines.

Gil Snook is the kind of name and the kind of regular everyman figure with women problems who you can find in the novels of Philip K Dick, but they aren't uncommon in Bob Shaw novels either, with characters like Warren Peace from Who Goes Here?. This of course provides an accessible way into some hard science fiction concepts, concepts that Gil is surprisingly quick to grasp, but it also provides a sympathetic figure, a regular but intelligent guy with sociability problems that Shaw's readership could readily identify with. It works well, both in terms of the human touch as well as providing an exciting science-fiction adventure into the discovery of unknown worlds, this time not so very far away from us.