World Famous Comics: In the Ocean of Night (Galactic Center, Volume 1)
In the Ocean of Night (Galactic Center, Volume 1)
By: Gregory Benford Publisher: Aspect Average Rating: Binding: Mass Market Paperback Label: Aspect Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 448 Publication Date: February 01, 2004
Asteroids colliding with Earth, Big Foot and Ancient astronauts The English-American astronaut Nigel prevents an asteroid from colliding with Earth, but finds is is a hollow space ship. This leads to a plot about rampaging AI robots, ancient astronauts and big foot. The plot has more sex than most adventure science fiction and talks about evolution in a pretty ignorant manner. The use of drugs and stream of consciousness techniques add some spice to a nearly limp plot. NASA takes a deserved beating in the plot as being more political than scientific.
Serious attempt gone seriously wrong Wow! in a very bad sense. What was heralded as Benford's flagship series turned out to be a slow boat to nowhere. Only about 10 pages are actually worth reading and are interesting: an alien intelligence flies near earth and wants information about the civilization, but scampers off when humans throw a nuke at it (go figure!). The rest of the book is filled with inane thoughts which just run page after page and provides nothing the the characters or plot. The plot never picks up, it just drags on and on until the end when the "bombshell" idea of Benford's turns out to be the most ridiculous plot-twist or terrible joke gone terribly wrong. It's so bad, my jaw went slack and thought to myself, "Oh my god, he can't seriously be going in this direction."
Tiemscape, another book by Benford, was well accepted. I didn't like that book either because it was also full of banal thoughts and dinner parties. I don't wanna read about wine when the earth is on the verge of collapse.
If you're looking for sci-fi, avoid this book I original wrote my review as a comment on another review, so forgive me if you run across it twice.
I've been slogging my way through this novel, hoping against hope that it actually gets interesting, but after 300 pages, I'm about to set it aside out of sheer boredom. The author strays from the science fiction portions of the novel with uninteresting side-trips and distractions that subtract from the momentum of the story.
I bought this book thinking it would be a sci-fi adventure, however, it spends too much time on the philosophical questions that plague the protagonist, and the author seems to enjoy writing as if the characters were experiencing everything in a disconnected dream-sequence like manner... very annoying for the reader. The only interesting parts of the novel are when the characters are interacting with the alien intelligence, or dealing with the harsh environments of space. I will not bother exploring the other books in this series.
Wow, HOW BAD can it get??? Let this be a warning to all sci-fi fans: this is the WORST - and by far!!! - of all sci-fi I have ever read! This guy, who supposedly is even a trained "real scientist" in astrophysics (!!!) makes so many blatant and basic mistakes in his fantasy stories that a person with a halfway decent education and knowledge in physics cannot stand to read this garbage! My husband, a physicist, thinks the author must have smoked some really bad weeds when he put this together! I never write bad reviews if I can avoid it, but there is no half measure here. Not to mention his totally erratic writing style, which goes from fragmented sentences (pages and pages long!) to simply starting a story line with characters and then - poof!! - they just disappear never to show up again. I figure he did not know what to do with them, so he just drops them, probably hoping we won't notice? I bought the entire series of his, based on some folks very positive ratings. Thank goodness, I bought most of the books "used", so I paid only shipping and a few cents for them. But even though, I don't even want them sitting around on my shelves, that is how bad this is! I am going to put them into the paper recycling container in the alley, that way, at least the paper volume can serve some future useful purpose. Don't waste your time reading any of it, you have been warned!
Wow how thing's (scifi) have changed... After you've read enough scifi you can start to get a feel for how novels are influenced by the era in which they're written. This novel reads like a cultural excursion back to the flower power era. Benford attempts to extrapolate the cultural aspects of the time (novel relationship triples, effects of pollution on health, resource depletion of the Earth, casual use of mind altering substances, etc...) into the future but completely fails to visualize any advances in technology (computers and the internet). The book is a not enjoyable to read, there's too much juvenile bravado and characters that serve only to echo the writers ego. Benford becomes quiet full of himself in the Epilogue.
One good thing: I have always been haunted by an episode of the Six Million Dollar Man (yes, Lee Majors) that involved a moon base and BigFoot. I vaguely remember this show as I was very young when it was aired. But after reading this novel, I have an idea of where the plot came from.
Anything Goes Trivia
Megaton Man
Trevor
