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A review by infinispace
In the Ocean of Night by Gregory Benford
2.0
Full review: http://infinispace.net/2015/03/review-in-the-ocean-of-night-by-gregory-benford/
In the Ocean of Night started out promising, but it's "fixup" novel structure quickly began to crack through the interesting facade. What starts as a mysterious and potentially threatening first contact scenario quickly turns into a political/neo-religious read strewn with the land mines of inconsistent and broken science. For example, the main character has cybernetic implants in his brain that can allow an alien AI take over his body, but he lives in a world that still uses pagers, fax machines, and typewriters. Eventually Benford just walks off a cliff and plummets into a boiling caldera of literary magma when he links (better sit down for this one) bigfoot (yes, THAT bigfoot, sasquatch) to aliens who visited Earth in the past. He even arms them with alien tubes that spew deadly lasers. Bigfoot.."lasers." Cue Dr. Evil voice.
I'm bound and determined to work my way through the Galactic Center series. I attribute the poor quality of this book to its fixup nature (and possible drug use in the 70s) and hope the follow on books are much better, because the overall premise is of interest to me.
In the Ocean of Night started out promising, but it's "fixup" novel structure quickly began to crack through the interesting facade. What starts as a mysterious and potentially threatening first contact scenario quickly turns into a political/neo-religious read strewn with the land mines of inconsistent and broken science. For example, the main character has cybernetic implants in his brain that can allow an alien AI take over his body, but he lives in a world that still uses pagers, fax machines, and typewriters. Eventually Benford just walks off a cliff and plummets into a boiling caldera of literary magma when he links (better sit down for this one) bigfoot (yes, THAT bigfoot, sasquatch) to aliens who visited Earth in the past. He even arms them with alien tubes that spew deadly lasers. Bigfoot.."lasers." Cue Dr. Evil voice.
I'm bound and determined to work my way through the Galactic Center series. I attribute the poor quality of this book to its fixup nature (and possible drug use in the 70s) and hope the follow on books are much better, because the overall premise is of interest to me.