Search Worlds Without End

The Minervan Experiment is an omnibus of the Giants series: Inherit the Stars, The Gentle Giants of Ganymede and Giants' Star.

Giants is a series of five sf books by James P. Hogan beginning in '77. The story follows several scientists who discover how humans originated on a planet named Minerva which orbited the Sol System between Mars and Jupiter. When Minerva was destroyed during a civil war a handful of people migrated from a lunar colony to Earth and colonized it. The colonists' descendants soon forgot their technology and where their ancestors had come from and began our current view of history.

The man on the moon was dead. They called him Charlie. He had big eyes, abundant body hair, and fairly long nostrils. His skeletal body was found clad in a bright red spacesuit, hidden in a rocky grave. They didn't know who he was, how he got there, or what had killed him. All they knew was that his corpse was fifty thousand years old -- and that meant this man had somehow lived long before he ever could have existed.

Long before the world of the Ganymeans blew apart millennia ago, the strange race of giants had already vanished. All that remained of them was a wrecked ship abandoned on a frozen moon of Jupiter. Now Earth's scientists are there, determined to ferret out the secret of the lost race. But when suddenly the Ganymeans return, they bring with them answers that will reveal the secret of our own as well.

Eons ago, a gentle race of giants fled the planet Minerva, leaving the ancestors of man to fend for themselves. Fifty thousand years ago, Minerva exploded, hurling its moon into an orbit about Earth.

In the twenty-first century, scientists Victor Hunt and Chris Danchekker, doing research on Ganymede, attract a small band of friendly aliens who are lost in time - and who begin to reveal something of the origin of mankind. Finally, man believed that he comprehended his place in the universe... until he learned of the Watchers in the stars. Now Earth finds itself in the middle of a power struggle between a benevolent alien empire and an off-shoot group of upstart humans who hate Earth more than any alien ever could.

Human society on Jevlen was falling apart -- and it looked as if JEVEX, the immense super-computer that managed all Jevlenese affairs, was at the heart of the matter. Except that the problems didn't stop when JEVEX was shut down. People were changing -- or being changed. It was almost as if the Jevlenese were being possessed...

Meanwhile, in a very different universe, where magic worked and nothing physical was predictable, holy men caught glimpses of another place, a place where the shape of objects remained unchanged by motion, and cause led directly and logically to effect. And the best part was that when the heart was pure, the mind was focused, and circumstances were right, some lucky souls could actually make the transition to that other universe. If only they all could...

TRANSPORTED ACROSS THE MUILTIVERSE.

Over light-years of space and 50,000 years back in time, to create a new history.... Only to find there was no way back.

Earth is adapting to a future of amicable coexistence with the advanced aliens from Thurien, descended from ancestors who once inhabited Minerva, a vanished planet of the Solar System. The plans of the distantly related humans on the rogue world Jevlen to eliminate their ancient Terran rivals and take over the Thurien system of worlds have been thwarted, but the mystery remains of how it was possible for the fleeing Jevlenese leaders to have been flung back across space and time to reappear at Minerva before the time of its destruction.

Victor Hunt and a group of his colleagues travel to Thurien to conduct a joint investigation with the alien scientists into the strange physics of interconnectedness between the countless alternate universes that constitute ultimate reality. When their discoveries lead first to bizarre communication with bewildered counterparts in other universes, and thence to the possibility of physical travel, the notion is conceived of sending a mission back to the former world of Minerva with the startling objective of creating a new family of realities in which its destruction is avoided. But Imares Broghuilio, the deposed Jevlenese leader, along with several thousand dedicated followers with five heavily armed starships, are already there. And they have a score to settle.