Book review: Journey to the Center

I have vague but fond memories of The Halcyon Drift, but have not read any Brian Stableford for... many decades. The cover of this is not promising, but never mind, I gave it a whirl. I slightly regret doing so; the book itself is not worth reading, as I should have known, except perhaps as a slight foreshadow of Bank's Matter.

The first para of this review is pretty telling. Both for why you might want to read it, but why you actually don't.

The plot - I expound it, because I shall rely on your accepting my recommendation not to bother read this thing - is the familiar lone-explorer type of guy getting pressed into leading a group of people into a situation, in this case a quasi-artifical planet with multiple levels. Since each level is, say, only 100 m thick there are - unlike in Matter - potentially tens of thousands of levels in the interior, and who knows what vast riches of alien relics; we get the usual sort of stuff where loners go off exploring. Weirdly, it is supposed that there may be aliens in the interior who have lost contact with the surface, for some reason when building the world they neglected to lay any cable feeds upwards, never mind.

Aanyway, apart from a bit of wham-bam stuff Our Hero ends up meeting the aliens, sort of, and then comes out again. This is but the first of a trilogy so somewhing more exciting might happen in the next two volumes, but I'm not holding my breath or planning to find out.