Part 3 in a four-book review of Matthew Reilly's novelsContest -> Ice Station -> Temple -> Seven Ancient Wonders<= Ice Station.... couldn't believe it! This, I believe, is Matthew's third novel, and by now he had devolved almost to the level he attained in the only other of his books that I read.But for now, let's stay with this one. True to his chosen trademark, Matthew creates a plot which is so far removed from reality that it cannot seriously be considered any more as a thriller. Fiction does not have to be realistic, but it does have to be internally consistent. For example, if I write a thriller featuring a crack soldier (not a superhero) who finds himself locked up in a steel chamber, I create suspense if I explore ways in which my character will be able to extricate himself from this predicament. It will not do if I portray my soldier to punch a hole in the steel door with his bare fist, and then leg it, having made short work of the problem. My character is a soldier, not a superhero. There is nothing wrong with fiction that involves superheroes, only the hero in my example was not one. That's what I mean with consistent, but not realistic.But surely, Matthew would not do this? Well, let's see. At some point in this novel, William Race, our hero, finds himself inside an Abrams battle tank which has been dropped from a cargo plane and is hurtling freely towards the ground, its fall unbroken by parachutes. William manages to climb out of the truck while in free fall, and one second before it hits the ground is saved by his jetpack, which automatically ignites and gets him out of harm's way.Oh really. Matthew is seriously inviting his readers to believe that this is possible? Just for a bit fun, let me explore what that would involve. We need a jetpack which is able to fire jets with a force sufficient to neutralise the speed of a falling tank. This force will be equal to the William's mass multiplied by the change in velocity required. Delta velocity, in this case, is the velocity of the falling tank one second before impact, as we require a force sufficient to make William just hover at a distance above the ground. And the velocity is the terminal velocity of an object falling through the atmosphere. So, let's calculate the terminal velocity of an Abrams tank. To do this, we need the following ingredients:(a) the mass of the object. Matthew says this is 67 tonnes(b) gravitational acceleration g. This is 9.81 ms^-2(c) the density of the fluid though which the object is falling. In the case of atmosphere near ground level, this is 1.25 kgm^-3(d) the projected area of the object. Matthew says in the novel that the truck had tipped forward, so is falling vertically towards earth. An Abrams tank is 2.44m wide by 3.66m high, so that's 8.9m^2(e) the drag coefficient. I guess an Abrams tank may look a little like a flat square if it comes hurtling towards you with the tip forward, and for such a shape Wikipedia informs me the coefficient is about 1.Now we mash this together in the formula for terminal velocity and get 343ms-1. That is quite fast, actually. The speed of sound is 340ms-1 so William, sitting outside the tank, holding on to the turret with his bare hands at 1235km/h, will just a fraction of a second before his jetpack ignites have broken the sound barrier. Perfectly feasible of course. And what force do we now need to break this fall? Matthew says that William's J-7 DARPA jetpack fired automatically when the tank was 27m above the ground, bringing him to a stationary hover 10m above the ground. So we need to apply a force capable of slowing a grown man plus his jetpack from the speed of sound to standstill over a distance of 17m. Let's see. William is 1.75m tall and a fit guy. So let's say he weighs 80kg, all muscle of course. There actually were jetpacks designed for DARPA - these were unwieldy contraptions built by Bell Aerosystms in the 70s and weighed some 30kg. So let's run with that. From what we know, we can calculate the time it takes to travel 17m while applying constant deceleration to zero. Won't take long, as you can imagine - about 0.05 secs. Using F=m*a, and a=dv/dt it follows that we need a force in the region of 700-800 kN to achieve this. Sounds abstract? Let me put this into perspective. A Merlin 1D rocket develops 650 kN thrust at sea level, and the Merlin 1D Vac engine generates 800 kN. What are these? They are rocket engines powering the Falcon 9 spaceflight launch vehicle operated by space transportation company Space X. So here we have a jet pack with the force of a rocket used to lift satellites into orbit and a human passenger who is able to withstand this force with absolutely no problems. I rest my case. No, thrillers do not have to be realistic. But they do have to work. This sequence is just stupid, and, worse, Matthew clearly believes that his readers are stupid. So why did I pick up another one of his, years later? I am not really sure, to be honest. As I said, I like the idea of this sort of novel. I guess I was hoping that he may have gone back to the style of Contest when I picked up Seven Ancient Wonders. Instead, ...=> Seven Ancient Wonders
I wouldn't normally have picked up a book like Temple on my own, but it was recommended to me by a student and he even lent me his own copy of the book. The result? I am considering pressing charges against the student for submitting me to cruel and unusual punishment. Let me point out that I am not beyond dumb thrillers. If it is handled well enough, I can't get enough of them. But I do have a problem with thrillers that make me laugh (not intentionally), then wince, then groan, and then finally lock inside a room with a nuclear weapon and detonate it (which, basically, happens in the book, and which, amusingly enough, the protagonist survives). Where do I start? Some of the first things that set me off was the back story of a Spanish priest in the Inca kingdom at the time of conquest. Usually I would be quite open to such a tale since I am an amateur historian of this era, yet when the Reilly shows the story of the priest being written in the exact same, annoying style that he writes the rest of the novel, you begin to wonder why he even put on the pretext that this was an ancient document. Either that or we are to believe that Reilly is a descendant of Spanish priests and that the bad writing is simply hereditary. Then, as if this ridiculous back story weren't enough, all of the sudden we have these mythic gigantic panthers enter the story. It was almost as if he thought ... well, I've stretched my credibility quite a bit already, but how can I really blow it off the charts? Then we have double climaxes, both of them involving a nuclear weapon capable of blowing up the world (which, frankly, is hard to explain, credibly, why any country in the world would legitimately want to make), and both of them involving ridiculous escapes by our wannabe Indiana-Jones-esque protagonist (complete with old hat that survives all of the improbable escapes, cleverly disguised as a Yankees cap instead of a fedora, of course). Some of my favorite (laugh out loud) moments, were when Reilly felt like he had to accentuate his action scenes by throwing in an exclamation point at the end of the sentence, as if saying, well, if the image I'm describing isn't getting you thrilled enough, then I'll just force you into it with a shocking exclamation point thrown in at the end. An example would be something like this. Race saw a giant panther come out of the mist! (I am paraphrasing the ridiculousness by the way, but please do not think that it in any way diminishes how ridiculous it is.) At times the exclamation point isn't enough and he feels justified in italicizing the sentence as well. Now I understand that picking apart any thriller is an easy thing to do, since most of them are based on pretty shady premises to start out with, so let me try to address this diplomatically. I think that Reilly tried to pack waaaay too much into one novel. One of the aspects would have been enough: world-destroying weapon, giant panthers, ancient Inca treasure, modern day Nazis, Armed Forces conspiracy, to name a few. All of these together make for a fascinating train wreck, but a terrible novel all the same. The other suggestion would be for Reilly to stick to his field of expertise. It seems to me that he seems pretty well versed in military equipment and forces. But his knowledge of history is laughable and embarrassing. Besides the non-ancient style of the priest's writing, there are the Incas riding horses as if they are Plains Indians, yet they've never known horses until Pizarro brought them to Cuzco. Sigh. I must stop myself before I wear out my fingers. However, let me say, to Reilly's credit, that I did enjoy one action scene that he showed on a river. It was, of course, unbelievable, but in the fun way that thrillers are supposed to be. Why did it work? I can't say exactly, but I suspect that it has something to do with the lack of world-destroying weapons, giant panthers, ancient Inca treasures ... well, I think you got the idea. So, here is my final recommendation: the next time you see Matthew Reilly's Temple, run away screaming! (Please imagine that last sentence in an intense italics.)
What do You think about Temple (2002)?
A re-read for about the forth time because I was out of new fiction and wanted something fun and fast after finishing The Casual Vacancy.It is a better book than The Casual Vacancy? No.Is it more of a fun read? Hell, yes!As I've noted before, Reilly's forte is airport-style action novels. If Stephen King is the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and Fries, Matthew Reilly is the literary equivalent of a Michael Bay/Jerry Bruckheimer movie. He provides heroic characters fighting impossible odds, blowing tons of stuff up, defying the laws of gravity and producing a body toll greater than many national disasters.Temple is Reilly in full Indiana Jones/Michael Crichton style (with more than a few homages to Star Wars too), in a race against time to find a religious artefact that has scientific properties that could literally bring about the end of the world. If you want Incans, Nazis, doomsday cults, Green Berets, DARPA, river chases, lots of guns and explosions, and don't care much about the laws of physics, Reilly is your guy.It's over-the-top action, but Reilly did it better in Temple, Contest and Ice Station that his latter books, as he was trying to write a good, fast story, rather than continually trying to top his previous works in terms of straining credibility (his Jack West series takes so many liberties with reality that they make Temple seem like a documentary).
—B.G.M. Hall
I really tried to finish this book but after 60% in I just couldn't read it anymore. I'm not sure what age group it's meant to be for because at times I felt like it was written for teenagers, while other times it was the standard adult ficton thriller I'm use to. The main problem I find is how it's written. The flow is all over the place, the direction is predictable, and the whole fight with the cats felt like it was going on for 100 pages... wait, I think it did! He has this way of sucking me into and idea or action sequence and by the time I'm 2-3 pages in I already don't care anymore because he has pages breaks up the wazoo and starts and stops with so much BS in between. It's hard to explain but I've never read a novel written like this one was before. Anyway, this is my first read from this author and it wasn't a good experience. If I was 15 I think I would have liked it more.
—Mark
This is my favourte Reilly book so far. It's a big fat blockbuster of a book but I ploughed through it in a couple of days. It's very edge-of-your-seat stuff, written in a cinematic style so it feels more like watching a fast paced action movie than reading a book.The story has two timelines, one set in the time of the Spanish conquest of the Incas and the other in Peru of 1999. The unlikely hero is William Race, a mild mannered, likable linguisitcs expert who, during this story, finds himself on a mission to save the world.
—Annalee
