When I post a review to Amazon, I try to keep it upbeat and positive. On my own blog, I don't have to be quite so subdued. Golden Buddha was a piece of drivel that was truly awful! The number of times in my life that I put a book aside without finishing it can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Chalk up one more for that very small count. Here's the review:
How sad! I’m a Dirk Pitt fan from way, way back. For my money, Clive Cussler is a former heavyweight world champion in the thriller department! But in Golden Buddha, he’s reduced himself to the status of an overweight, out of shape punch drunk fighter that just doesn’t know when to hang up the gloves and retire!
As a musican and former guitar teacher I took personal insult at one point in the story! Cussler would have his readers believe it is possible for a collection of non-musician mercenaries to substitute themselves for a professional band, lip-synch three sets of rock music and fake the instrument playing sufficiently well to stand up to the scrutiny of a few hundred people in close proximity at a private party! Give your head a shake, Clive!
For Juan Cabrillo, the chairman of the Corporation, a collection of high-tech wizards and mercenaries, think Mr Phelps of former Mission Impossible fame! Monica Crabtree is a slutty version of Barbara Bain with boobs on steroids! If that comparison seems a little silly, keep it in mind when you try reading Golden Buddha if you feel like you’ve got a few hours to blow on something that just doesn’t make the grade! Some of the one liners will give you a wan smile or two but, frankly, I was generally uncertain as to whether Cussler was trying to be serious or trying to satirize himself and the thriller genre. It doesn’t matter – whichever one you believe it is - Cussler didn’t succeed anyway!
The thing that makes me angrier than anything else is that I’ve already purchased The Trojan Odyssey. I'll read it but unless Cussler pulls a real rabbit out of his hat, he’s off my list for good! Maybe I can persuade a second hand book store to give me a buck or two to take them off my hands.
Tuesday, September 27, 2005
Sunday, September 25, 2005
City, by Clifford D Simak, although written in a very easy to read style, was not a happy book to read. But, it is most certainly deserving of the moniker classic - 5 stars and 2 thumbs up! Here's the review I posted on Amazon:
City is a masterpiece of creative genius crafted in Simak's trademark soft-spoken, pastoral style - a breath of fresh air contrasted against today's hard-boiled, fast-paced and typically cynical style of writing. A series of loosely joined short stories is presented as the myths and legends that are told by dogs around their campfires to each other and their pups in a future so distant that no dog is actually certain that the creature Man ever really truly existed. From the standpoint of the reader, City represents a Michener or Rutherfurd style multi-generational family saga - a future history, in other words. Mankind, as represented by the Webster family and their robot, Jenkins, is seen as ascending to marvelous heights of technological achievement while evolving away from a traditional city style government, travelling to the stars and beyond, but ultimately descending into an agoraphobic, dystopian Spartan existence and disappearing into extinction. Jenkins - a ten thousand year old repository of flawless electronic memory and the only remaining human artifact - knows the true story of man's rise and fall but, acting in a fashion distinctly unlike anything Asimov might have attributed to a robot, keeps it to himself. Jenkins has concluded he owes canine society an opportunity to grow and flourish on its own unaware of the fact that dogs were once nothing more than pets to a mean-spirited and violent race of humans.
Although City contemplates a lonely ending to mankind as a species, hard core tech weenie sci-fi fans will rub their hands with glee as they read of Simak's imagination and prescience at work - automatic lawnmowers, atomic powered private planes, televisor ports, laboratories and manned bases on Venus, Jupiter and Pluto, an inter-stellar expedition to Alpha Centauri, the demise of natural farming fuelled in part by the rise of mass production hydroponics, ICBMs, inter-dimensional transportation, fireplaces reduced to an anachronistic self-indulgence, suspended animation called "The Sleep" as a psychologically gentler form of suicide, and, of course, thinking, sentient robots as servants and work mates.
To draw on a cosmological metaphor, the ending for man that Simak tells of is not the violent, catastrophic big crunch type ending that would see us wiped out in a blaze of glory. He rather talks of a much bleaker, almost unbearably sad ending to humanity as it simply disappears - the infinite boredom of heat death, as it were, as all motion ends and the universe reaches a boundless uniformity with the maximization of entropy. Simak is blistering in his criticism of man's arrogant opinion of his own place in the world, a theme he will return to again and again in such novels as Time is the Simplest Thing and Time and Again:
"But man had changed. He had lost the old knowledge and old skills. His mind had become a flaccid thing. He lived from one day to the next without any shining goal. But he still kept the old vices - the vices that had become virtues from his own viewpoint and raised him by his own bootstraps. He kept the unwavering belief that his was the only kind, the only life that mattered - the smug egoism that made him the self-appointed lord of all creation."
At once inspiring, frightening, un-nerving, depressing and yet touching, City is a classic that needs to be read by all true sci-fi fans.
The review is at http://tinyurl.com/8zbxh
Votes, comments and discussion always welcome!
City is a masterpiece of creative genius crafted in Simak's trademark soft-spoken, pastoral style - a breath of fresh air contrasted against today's hard-boiled, fast-paced and typically cynical style of writing. A series of loosely joined short stories is presented as the myths and legends that are told by dogs around their campfires to each other and their pups in a future so distant that no dog is actually certain that the creature Man ever really truly existed. From the standpoint of the reader, City represents a Michener or Rutherfurd style multi-generational family saga - a future history, in other words. Mankind, as represented by the Webster family and their robot, Jenkins, is seen as ascending to marvelous heights of technological achievement while evolving away from a traditional city style government, travelling to the stars and beyond, but ultimately descending into an agoraphobic, dystopian Spartan existence and disappearing into extinction. Jenkins - a ten thousand year old repository of flawless electronic memory and the only remaining human artifact - knows the true story of man's rise and fall but, acting in a fashion distinctly unlike anything Asimov might have attributed to a robot, keeps it to himself. Jenkins has concluded he owes canine society an opportunity to grow and flourish on its own unaware of the fact that dogs were once nothing more than pets to a mean-spirited and violent race of humans.
Although City contemplates a lonely ending to mankind as a species, hard core tech weenie sci-fi fans will rub their hands with glee as they read of Simak's imagination and prescience at work - automatic lawnmowers, atomic powered private planes, televisor ports, laboratories and manned bases on Venus, Jupiter and Pluto, an inter-stellar expedition to Alpha Centauri, the demise of natural farming fuelled in part by the rise of mass production hydroponics, ICBMs, inter-dimensional transportation, fireplaces reduced to an anachronistic self-indulgence, suspended animation called "The Sleep" as a psychologically gentler form of suicide, and, of course, thinking, sentient robots as servants and work mates.
To draw on a cosmological metaphor, the ending for man that Simak tells of is not the violent, catastrophic big crunch type ending that would see us wiped out in a blaze of glory. He rather talks of a much bleaker, almost unbearably sad ending to humanity as it simply disappears - the infinite boredom of heat death, as it were, as all motion ends and the universe reaches a boundless uniformity with the maximization of entropy. Simak is blistering in his criticism of man's arrogant opinion of his own place in the world, a theme he will return to again and again in such novels as Time is the Simplest Thing and Time and Again:
"But man had changed. He had lost the old knowledge and old skills. His mind had become a flaccid thing. He lived from one day to the next without any shining goal. But he still kept the old vices - the vices that had become virtues from his own viewpoint and raised him by his own bootstraps. He kept the unwavering belief that his was the only kind, the only life that mattered - the smug egoism that made him the self-appointed lord of all creation."
At once inspiring, frightening, un-nerving, depressing and yet touching, City is a classic that needs to be read by all true sci-fi fans.
The review is at http://tinyurl.com/8zbxh
Votes, comments and discussion always welcome!
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