By Peter Cawdron. Amazon flung this at me as part of Prime on Kindle, so I experimented with reading it. And I will admit I found the first 80-90% of it very good, in a page-turning sort of way, though the prose is not sparkling. Goodreads slobbers all over it, with some exceptions, but I maintain that this is in a long tradition of books where the build up is good, but when the author has to finally deliver on what-the-aliens-actually-are, lacks the imagination to so deliver; see-also Rendezvous with Rama. Unfortunately in this case in his desperation to deliver an ending, our author completely contradicts his earlier pages.
So (spoilers ahead...) all is well until the Giant Alien Spaceship turns up at the Lagrange point and Our Heroes attempt contact. When I say "well", I mean "well with the book"; lots of people have died of course. And in fact I don't quite mean that, because during the flyby somehow the ionisation trail of the GAS has somehow taken out all the world's nukes. This is not, as the characters themselves realise, plausible. Also (as the author later admits, when he allows himself a rebuilt nuke to take out the GAS) the mode of removal would have allowed them to be rebuild really very quickly. And even... it just isn't needed for the plot (though it would have fitted with the non-insane ending we didn't get).
During contact, Our Heroes realise - really rather belatedly - that the ship can't have come from Taurus as it would have taken far far too long. Where is does come from is never decided. They then realise that it is in some sense quasi-organic, although how such a thing could be strong enough to survive the various megatonne fly-throughs is not discussed. Then the alien briefly appears, almost comically all fangs and stuff. I really genuinely at that point thought it would turn out to be some sort of projection tuned to human desires and fears but no: our author has for weird reasons decided to throw in a Scary Alien which Wanted to Eat The World. Then they blow it up and live happily ever after. But! There's a problem: the GAS has gone from directed-by-intelligence to just-instinctive (the SAWWTETW is not intelligent, I think because the author can't bear to think that intelligence would be hostile) and so there is no possibility of it having done the flyby targetting so accurately. This, too, is not discussed. It is also totally unclear where it got its initial velocity from.
What's odd also is the way Our Heroes - well, mostly the Token Female Scientist - go from complete certainty that the GAS is non-hostile to total certainty that it is hostile, with no real evidence for either position. They see a thing with teeth that eats their probe (which pulls in the Orion capsule; I had wondered why the probe needed to be on a tether, the reasons given were not plausible, and the answer turns out to be "so that the probe's tether could pull in the Orion and cause serious but not fatal damage") and instantlly switch to total hostility, without even a token "well it would be a shame to just nuke this interesting new life form, couldn't we at least try to take some pix first?" which any genuine Sci would have said).
My best theory to explain this is that the author has inexplicably mashed together two different books, one a start and one an end, that he happened to have lying around.
No comments:
Post a Comment