Readings: Greg Bear's Eon

I finished Greg Bear's Eon a few days back. I can't remember the last time i'd been so disappointed by a book. It had the best hook i'd read in quite a while, the blurb at the back, very enticing. What it turned out to be was a badly written mess with the sci-fi almost getting buried under the political crap.

The book is about this giant 300 km asteroid that appears suddenly in the Solar System. It had seven chambers inside, each connected to the next. The seventh chamber, however, extends forever. The asteroid is longer on the inside than on the outside.

Such an interesting concept, and what Bear does is bury it under some retarded US-Russia cold-war political/war crap. The US/Nato controls the stone, and gives slots to scientists from other countries. Russia gets about seven, and aren't allowed into the 7th chamber (or 6th onwards, i don't really remember). Stung by this restriction, the Russians attempt to do a hostile takeover in space. This absolutely unimaginative, dreary sub-plot takes up nearly half the narration.

Any sense of awe at what's being described is quickly eroded by the clunky prose. The charaters aren't developed at all, so you don't care what happens to them. For instance, when they do actually meet the creators of the asteroid, i couldn't sense any feeling of shock or wonder in their reactions.

So in a sense, this was pretty similar to his other book that i'd read, Blood Music, in that the concept is extremely strong, but he's unable to write "epic" in any manner.

Readings: Federal Investigations, Dinosaurs and Subway Muggings

Just out down David Baldacci's Total Control. It's a story that moves on from an investigation of a plane crash to a case of industrial espionage gone horribly wrong, and moves onto a far bigger conspiracy. Anything else would be a spoiler for sure. Fairly engrossing, clocking in at over 500 pages, though it could definitely have some fat trimmed off, and made a little more taut. Not a must-read by any stretch of imagination, but not altogether too bad.

Some books that preceded this: Re-read Michael Chrichton's Jurrasic Park and The Lost World, after watching the trilogy last week. It was a nice excercise to compare the two. The books have such a lot more tham simply dinosaur-chomping action. It's overwhelming at times to think of all the research Chricton must be doing for his books. I mean, for these two, he must have at the very least studied dinosaurs, extinction theories, the functioning of amusement parks and zoos, and chaos theory (in a lot more detail than the usual "a butterfly flaps it wings.." heh). Makes me think of his novel Congo, and that travesty of an adaptation hollywood made...

Alex Garland's Coma. It's a story of a guy who's beaten up during a mugging, and lands in the hospital, in a coma. When he wakes up, he's not sure if he's really awake, or dreaming that he's awake. There are about 40 chapters, ranging from a few paras to a few pages. Each chapter has a b&w illustration accompanying it. Interesting concept, but it's too short to be wholly satisfying. An interesting experiment, if nothing else.