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3.83 AVERAGE
3.83 AVERAGE
adventurous
medium-paced
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
A confluence of a lot of interesting ideas that is ultimately just executed ok. Everything from mass surveillance to the origin of humanity is covered in a set of ideas that is almost too vast. At the center of it all is the time viewer - which is a concept that I thought I would enjoy more than I did.
Really this concept is executed better in PastWatch, the Orson Scott CRard. Ultimately though the story itself is just ok.
Really this concept is executed better in PastWatch, the Orson Scott CRard. Ultimately though the story itself is just ok.
This might be the worst novel I read this year, I certainly hope I don't read anything worse without being paid for it. First of this book is billed as a hard SF golden age, or as I like to say, bronze age, book and it lives up to its billing. First, it has the paper thin characters that characterized early SF. Even within these, there are horrible inconsistencies, why does Hiram, a paranoid control freak, hire Kate, a known enemy, to run a super-sensitive project? Why does Kate even go along with it? Because her character has no backbone? Why does Bobby fall in love with Kate? Can a thirty five year marriage based one night of great sex work? Because nothing else in the text furthers this romance.
Next, plot, such as it is, jumps around in a random fashion with highly improbable activities, we have a widget than can track anybody, anywhere, any time, but we must of forgot how it works because Kate is kidnapped by Hiram for weeks. Hiram even brags about, they know Hiram has her! After being found by the magic widget she is rescued by the boyfriend, followed up by the FBI. It is standard police policy after all to let civilians lead hostage rescue missions.
As for the hard science, while it may be theoretically possible for it to work, it's hard to believe that random teenagers are making better, much smaller, watch-sized WormCams in less than a year after the big giant room filling versions are created. Also the later WormCam attachments become too much like magical plot devices, invented when need to drive what little plot there is. Last but not least there are some Electric Chicken Plucker err.. WormCam science explanations that are just plain lame, John Campbell warned against these in the late 30's, shades of Hugo Gernsbeck!
Finally there are the bizarre, historical digressions that occur in the story that don't support the plot and barely touch most of the characters in any form. In addition there is a long homage to Olaf Stapledon's "First and Last Man" which when I read it over forty years ago was fairly dated, which once again has no bearing on plot, the invention, or characters.
Collaborations between authors are tough, I can only think of Niven and Pournelle along with Nordhoff and Hall that wrote better books together rather than individually. I'm not sure how much of this book's flaws can be chalked up to this. However I'm not planning on reading any of the other collaborations that they did together.
I was expecting much more from this book, I've read better fanzine stuff.
Next, plot, such as it is, jumps around in a random fashion with highly improbable activities, we have a widget than can track anybody, anywhere, any time, but we must of forgot how it works because Kate is kidnapped by Hiram for weeks. Hiram even brags about, they know Hiram has her! After being found by the magic widget she is rescued by the boyfriend, followed up by the FBI. It is standard police policy after all to let civilians lead hostage rescue missions.
As for the hard science, while it may be theoretically possible for it to work, it's hard to believe that random teenagers are making better, much smaller, watch-sized WormCams in less than a year after the big giant room filling versions are created. Also the later WormCam attachments become too much like magical plot devices, invented when need to drive what little plot there is. Last but not least there are some Electric Chicken Plucker err.. WormCam science explanations that are just plain lame, John Campbell warned against these in the late 30's, shades of Hugo Gernsbeck!
Finally there are the bizarre, historical digressions that occur in the story that don't support the plot and barely touch most of the characters in any form. In addition there is a long homage to Olaf Stapledon's "First and Last Man" which when I read it over forty years ago was fairly dated, which once again has no bearing on plot, the invention, or characters.
Collaborations between authors are tough, I can only think of Niven and Pournelle along with Nordhoff and Hall that wrote better books together rather than individually. I'm not sure how much of this book's flaws can be chalked up to this. However I'm not planning on reading any of the other collaborations that they did together.
I was expecting much more from this book, I've read better fanzine stuff.
one day i might go back to this and be more forgiving but man, is that writing trite or what? i know the developing technology is supposed to have a huge impact--save the world, revolutionize journalism, etc etc-- but rather than be something uplifting or inspiring, it was focused on business politics more than anything. some scenes--the lines, the reactions, the faces--play out like a noontime drama.
When I was a couple of chapters into this book, I felt that I was going to struggle with it, since I was finding the characters unmemorable (and, when I did remember them, irritating), the plot thin and none of the really big ideas that Clarke is famous for. I was wondering if this was just another senile-period damp squib. However, I'd heard good things about it, so I stuck with it and was eventually rewarded.
A driven media entrepreneur, Hiram Patterson, creates a way to use artificial wormholes to view any point on earth, and he uses this to scoop his media rivals. The book starts getting interesting once a) the 'wormcams' are able to look backward in time (due to the nature of spacetime equivalence at the quantum level, Patterson's genius son David realises that as well as moving in space, the wormholes can move in time) and b) the technology becomes democratised and available to the mass populous.
It's at this point that the book starts tackling issues like the complete lack of privacy that becomes just about inevitable, and how now that everyone can become a peeping tom, society starts changing. We see extremes from a group called Refugees who use extreme technology to try and hide from the wormcam observers to the ones who go to the other extreme, eschewing any form of privacy, up to and including clothing (there's one scene that depicts a pair of teenagers having sex on a park bench in public, uncaring of the watchers).
The book suggests that people eventually beyond this and start using the technology in large "wiki" projects to eradicate corruption and crime, and stripping the mythology of the past to see what historical figures were really like, rather than the myths that have built up around them. However, call me cynical, but I'm not sure that if we had access to such technology we'd ever get beyond the peeping tom phase, extrapolating from similar high hopes for the Internet.
I continued to not find the human characters hugely interesting throughout the book, but couldn't ignore them for the ideas entirely. I suspect this may be Baxter's work, since Clarke's characters are often just narrative vehicles and entirely ignorable, but trying to force them to have their own story dragged the book down for me. The end, seeing Hiram's two sons, David and Bobby, 'travelling' far into earth's past as they followed their ancestors into geological time was a breathtaking journey showing me that Clarke still had what it takes to evoke my sense of wonder as effortlessly as he did forty years earlier.
So, hard work in places, but definitely worth reading.
A driven media entrepreneur, Hiram Patterson, creates a way to use artificial wormholes to view any point on earth, and he uses this to scoop his media rivals. The book starts getting interesting once a) the 'wormcams' are able to look backward in time (due to the nature of spacetime equivalence at the quantum level, Patterson's genius son David realises that as well as moving in space, the wormholes can move in time) and b) the technology becomes democratised and available to the mass populous.
It's at this point that the book starts tackling issues like the complete lack of privacy that becomes just about inevitable, and how now that everyone can become a peeping tom, society starts changing. We see extremes from a group called Refugees who use extreme technology to try and hide from the wormcam observers to the ones who go to the other extreme, eschewing any form of privacy, up to and including clothing (there's one scene that depicts a pair of teenagers having sex on a park bench in public, uncaring of the watchers).
The book suggests that people eventually beyond this and start using the technology in large "wiki" projects to eradicate corruption and crime, and stripping the mythology of the past to see what historical figures were really like, rather than the myths that have built up around them. However, call me cynical, but I'm not sure that if we had access to such technology we'd ever get beyond the peeping tom phase, extrapolating from similar high hopes for the Internet.
I continued to not find the human characters hugely interesting throughout the book, but couldn't ignore them for the ideas entirely. I suspect this may be Baxter's work, since Clarke's characters are often just narrative vehicles and entirely ignorable, but trying to force them to have their own story dragged the book down for me. The end, seeing Hiram's two sons, David and Bobby, 'travelling' far into earth's past as they followed their ancestors into geological time was a breathtaking journey showing me that Clarke still had what it takes to evoke my sense of wonder as effortlessly as he did forty years earlier.
So, hard work in places, but definitely worth reading.
I finished rereading this book today after first reading it a decade ago. I loved it at the time. Many of its images and ideas stayed with me over the years.
On the re-read the characters and plot both felt flat, but the ideas are still amazing.
On the re-read the characters and plot both felt flat, but the ideas are still amazing.
Interesting to see how Clarke and Baxter's perceptions of the future are playing out 19 years on. Although the part about UK ceding from the EU did hit particularly close to home!