http://www.saltmanz.com/blog/2006/11/...Yesterday (11/02/06) during lunch, I finished my most recent book: Cradle, by Arthur C. Clarke and Genry Lee.This is same team that wrote the last 3/4 of the Rama series (following Clarke's standalone classic, Rendevous With Rama). Those were good books. Cradle, which was written a couple of years before the Rama sequels, is not.Not that it's a terribly bad book. I was entertained for almost all of the 408 pages. But I'd never read it again. The book is basically a character study on the 3 protagonists, with the odd chapter of sci-fi alien stuff thrown in every hundred pages or so. Contrary to most reviews I've read, I actually found the characters engaging, and the sci-fi bits to be clunky and confusing. What little plot there is involves Carol (a reporter) hunting down a lost Navy missile somewhere off the Florida Keys. To do this, she charters a boat run by Nick and Troy. They go diving and find something odd, butt heads with some rival treasure hunters, and try to avoid the Navy. It's not as exciting as it sounds.Every main character has had one emotionally-traumatic experience in their past, and the authors take a chapter or two out of the story to replay this. Most maddening is the Navy Commander: his personal life and problems are dwelt on perhaps more so than any of the protagonists, and yet he has almost zero impact on the story. At first, the dialogue felt forced an unnatural, but either it got better, or I just grew accustomed to it.The aliens' side of the story is told in 3 or so single-chapter chunks, spaced out regularly throughout the book. But they're confusing, written in terms that manage to sound advanced yet wholly generic at the same time, and go on far too long for the scant information they provide. Eventually, near the end of the book, there's interaction between the aliens and the main characters, but you can already tell that there's not enough book left for anything to really happen. And it doesn't. The book even manages to end abruptly, after dragging on and on, plot-wise. No resolution or denouement; just the climax, and then "The End". Heck, my copy ends on the back of the last page, which means I hit the last sentence in the book, and then: back cover. Rather jarring, to tell the truth.Like I mentioned earlier, though, the characters were decent. Even if they were annoying or artificial-feeling to begin with, I got wrapped up in their adventures and cared about what happened to them, even if their stories didn't actually go anywhere.I won't likely ever read this again, and I can't in good conscience recommend it. I'll give it 1.5 out of 5 stars.
I don't think I'm going to touch Gentry Lee with a bargepole after this train crash of a book. It's so bad I'm almost tempted to stop this review right now because you shouldn't give too much time to things you don't love, right?Anyway, the problem with the book is Gentry Lee has this idea that character development should be the core of any book, even a science fiction one. A fine ideal to strive towards, certainly. But somebody failed to tell him that character development should be woven into the plot - bombarding the reader with dozens of pointless anecdotes and escapades about every character major and minor without, for a moment, giving us a hint as to how everything would tie in together in what's ostensibly a science fiction novel is immensely frustrating.An excellent pay-off in the form of a mind bogglingly visionary climax might still have redeemed the book somewhat, but we don't even get that. If the arduous character building at least resulted in complex, interesting characters that we'd kind of care about, this book would be somewhat palatable, even if still a failure as a science fiction book. But, and this is the biggest failure of all, Lee, after hundreds of pages of minute backstory development manages to construct remarkably two dimensional cutouts of stereotypical characters - the cold, successful, man-hating feminist; the happy-go-lucky black man who can't seem to say two words without referencing his race. Even the interactions between the characters never seem to evolve beyond the third grade playground bully variety. (Argh, my head.)Even after all that criticism, I'd happily take it all back if the writing were spectacular, and take in the book as a well written intellectual exercise, even if a rambling, pointless tale. But it isn't well written. It's often stilted, and the humour, if you can call it that, primarily around crude racial references.Is there any Arthur C. Clarke at all in this, you may wonder? I think there is a little, at least, in the sequences that describe the manouevrings of powerful alien races; sequences that are so out of tune with the rest of the book, that otherwise fine pieces of speculative writing may even begin to jar. Yes, Gentry Lee is so bad, he's made my Clarke hard to swallow. Avoid this book!
What do You think about Cradle (1989)?
I was expecting more, having read the 2001 series, so was very disappointed. Not a very well-written book, reads more like an author's first book than one from an experienced team. The plot was very contrived with convenient coincidences moving the plot along. There was a surprising amount of sexual suggestions in the book, this was completely unnecessary and slowed the book down. There were a number of details and plot lines in the book that were unnecessary, serving only to slow down the pace of the book or to set up some near-superhuman task the character would achieve later. The "futuristic" technologies described in the book including Kindle-like reading tablet and Skype video conferencing were interesting but not enough to save the book. The whole "aliens" theme was disappointing and derivative of the Foundations series.
—Ed
This book has some very classic A. C. Clarke-esque plot with aliens (who act in the typical A. C. Clarke-esque way a la Space Odyssey in the kind of "engineer" way), but for some reason most of the book (not sure if I should blame Gentry Lee entirely for that, but that was what first came to my mind) sounds like a bad 80s American movie with relationship drama, a few action scenes thrown in to indulge the public audience, and several scenes with at least slight sexual subtext.About the first two thirds of the book are incredibly dull. The prologue is beautiful, but after that, we fall into the investigation-movie type adventures on Florida, followed by pages and pages of flashbacks about the personal traumas of the main characters. That is interlaced by Clarke-esque narrations about the aliens, which however are unfortunately also dull. Again: the prologue is beautiful, but most of the other scenes about the aliens are incredibly vague and ununderstandable. Very elaborate descriptions of alien technology would probably work in a movie, where you can actually depict it, but to spend half a page saying how a octagon-shaped thing connects to several triangle-shaped things protruding from it in the angle of 172,3 degrees and then the octagon starts connecting to the hexagons we mentioned couple of pages earlier, is not a very interesting read.The characters are not the best thing in the book either. Generally speaking, all the men in the book have some deep personal trauma in their past, often consisting of sexual relationship with women, and all the women are either hyper-sexy or at least hyper-confident. The woman who is one of the main protagonists from the start is not hyper-sexualized, she is even said not to be any beauty queen, but she is still good at everything and sharp and witty and her too strong independance gets in the way of her personal life.I got to like the characters in the last third of the book, surprisingly, when the authors stopped spending ages on their deep psychological traumas from the past. The last third of the books was fairly good (if I don't mention one ridiculous James Bond-like scene (view spoiler)[involving a shark being released at divers and later also two sexy women fighting and one of them getting away by distracting the other by kissing her (hide spoiler)]
—Rosťa
Hm, disappointing. I'd wanted to try an Arthur C Clarke novel for a while and I think I should definitely have started with one of his others. I don't really know what this book was trying to be - it presents itself as a science fiction but this really seems to be a side-story, the rest of the book just seemed to waffle on about it's fairly dull cookie-cutter characters and their irrelevant back-stories. Additionally, it was also really sexist and I got quite annoyed at several points. I persevered to the end because the ideas behind the sci-fi element were interesting and intriguing (although a bit cliche these days, the book was written back in the 80s after all) but I can't say I was particularly impressed by the end. I'll still give another of Arthur C Clarke's books a go (I see this one was written with Gentry Lee, perhaps this due is to be avoided!) but certainly wouldn't recommend this.
—Perri Oldfield
