Binding: Unknown Binding
Edition: Collector's ed
Label: Easton Press
Manufacturer: Easton Press
Number Of Pages: 412
Publication Date: 1989
Publisher: Easton Press
Studio: Easton Press
Related Items:
Alternate Versions: Click to Display
Browse for similar items by category: Click to Display
Average Rating:
Rating:
-
For me this book was nearer standard fiction than sci-fi. It happens to be about scientists - with a small element of "sci-fi" in the quantum physics side to allow the plotline to exist.
It's strong points were the scientist characters, the descriptions of the political world of scientific institutions and occasionally excellent general writing. It's weak points were it's pacing (a bit slow from the middle onwards) and too much focus on irrelevent events/characters. Maybe this should ...
Read More
Rating:
-
Sci-fi writers make themselves hostages to fortune by setting their stories in the near future. Quite apart from the fact that no one predicted the internet or mobile phones, Greg Benford also failed to predict the disappearance by 1998 of those Cambridge institutions Bowes & Bowes and The Whim. Apart from that, this is his best book, but not in the top league of sci-fi.
Rating:
-
The plot is a catch, but what a disappointment when you start reading: you cope with stereotypical figures, unnecessary descriptions of moments in life and a painful stretching over 400 pages of what could otherwise be a marvelous short story. Very boring.
Rating:
-
Having been a physicist at the very same Cavendish Lab that is described in the book, I can assure you that the descriptions of life in a creaking English institution are 100% sound. I can't tell you whether the same is true of the parts of the book that take place in 60s California, but they all smelt real enough to me. What I can tell you though is that the physics, while fictional, is hard enough to satisfy a physics Ph.D. and any reviewer who says there are unresolved paradoxes in the story has missed ...
Read More
Rating:
-
This book was recommended to me, but, as I began to read the first chapter, I began to wonder why. The story starts with an unconvincing British family breakfast scene straight out of a 1950's BBC drama. I kept expecting Mr Chumley-Warner to walk in! Luckily, towards the end of the chapter, the scientist left the breakfast table and went to work where the plot got going.
The plot is that scientists are trying to contact the past to change an environmental catastrophe in the present, but ...
Read More
