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guidopetri's review against another edition
adventurous
inspiring
reflective
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
jonmhansen's review against another edition
3.0
I have never read a book so thick with technobabble before. Damned impressive.
brettt's review
2.0
After winning a bet by getting his first novel Inherit the Stars published, James Hogan decided he kind of liked writing and figured he'd take another shot at it. Dissatisfied with the way faster-than-light (FTL) travel was often shown in science fiction novels, he decided he would try to build a story around the process by which an FTL drive was discovered, and extrapolate it from then-known scientific principles. The result was 1978's The Genesis Machine.
Bradley Clifford is a brilliant researcher who spends his day hours working for a government-directed research facility and his spare time researching the strange behavior of subatomic particles. But the political climate frowns on research without application -- specifically military application -- and his private hobby gets him on the bad side of his bosses. When he quits and joins a like-minded co-researcher at one of the last private research foundations around, he pursues his own research to fantastic implications. But that draws the attention of the same military and government officials he just left, and they pressure Clifford to use his research for their purposes. How will he maintain his principles while not sacrificing his friends and allies to government pressure?
A design engineer by trade, Hogan shows real skill at exploring and explaining the science that drives his story. The characterizations are rather flat, which makes the final twist he sets up a little artificial as well. The politics and the "villains" of the piece are barely more than caricatures at best and more often cartoonish than anything else. Although he had more than a handful of good science fiction novels left in him, Genesis finds him doing pretty well at the science but leaving a lot to be desired in the fiction.
Original available here.
Bradley Clifford is a brilliant researcher who spends his day hours working for a government-directed research facility and his spare time researching the strange behavior of subatomic particles. But the political climate frowns on research without application -- specifically military application -- and his private hobby gets him on the bad side of his bosses. When he quits and joins a like-minded co-researcher at one of the last private research foundations around, he pursues his own research to fantastic implications. But that draws the attention of the same military and government officials he just left, and they pressure Clifford to use his research for their purposes. How will he maintain his principles while not sacrificing his friends and allies to government pressure?
A design engineer by trade, Hogan shows real skill at exploring and explaining the science that drives his story. The characterizations are rather flat, which makes the final twist he sets up a little artificial as well. The politics and the "villains" of the piece are barely more than caricatures at best and more often cartoonish than anything else. Although he had more than a handful of good science fiction novels left in him, Genesis finds him doing pretty well at the science but leaving a lot to be desired in the fiction.
Original available here.
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