Total Eclipse

In 2020, an international space team, exploring Sigma Draconis, 19 light-years from earth, discovers the remains of a highly advanced society that has left behind its most spectacular artifact: the largest telescope imaginable, carved and polished from a natural moon crater. Successive space crews determine that the native culture evolved and disappeared mysteriously after a mere 3,000 years of existence. It's now 2028. Another mission reaches the planet with just one goal—to discover why the civilization disappeared—and with just one hope—that this knowledge will prevent the same thing from happening on earth.

Exhibiting that rare sense of science fiction mystery that distinguished Arthur C. Clarke's 2001, John Brunner weaves a haunting tale of how 30 people attack the nearly insuperable task of unriddling the mysteries of a long-buried culture. Was it a fatal virus, an internecine war, a religion of lunatic brutality or a deleterious mutation that destroyed an entire civilization? All remains hypothesis until Ian Macauley unravels the riddle. But does it provide a solution to human problems and will the answer reach earth in time?