Book review: The Crucible of Time

By John Brunner. Wiki says "The novel deals with the efforts of an alien species to escape their homeworld, whose system is passing through a cloud of interstellar debris, resulting in a high rate of in-falling matter. The species' unique biology and their biological technology complicate matters" and that's about right. This review from Goodreads gets most of it: although the story is mostly interesting enough, it gets somewhat same-y after the first third. Perhaps because the first couple of chapters were published initially as short stories. And then the book becomes primitive-society-reaches-for-the-stars, and we kind of have to grind through their tech progress. Which he does his best to make interesting, since they are bio-focussed. But the recurring motif of society falling apart due to some natural catastrophe or another, and rebuilding slightly higher, gets a bit dull and towards the end just slows the book down.

There's some heavy-handed moralising thrown in: the religious folk are always trying to hinder scientific progress, and indeed religion for these aliens is almost the same as a detatched-from-reality state brought on by lack of nutrients. But again, it's repeated too often.