Play Book Tag discussion

Well, I should have known not to read something this old in scifi, but since Book 2 won three awards including both the Hugo and the Nebula and some of my scifi GR friends liked this novel a great deal, I thought I'd start with this. Why did I keep reading it? Several reasons, not the least of which was to write this review, but also in hopes it might get better and because some of the writing just made me laugh and not because it was meant to be funny. That said, had I read this between the ages of 10 and 15 I'd have thoroughly enjoyed this book because back then I just enjoyed scifi in general and could have cared less about character development and would have fully embraced some of the things that now make this book read worse--but bear in mind I can no longer watch Classic Trek, either.

Where to start? The blurb is rather vague, but suffice to say that if you have ever read Chariots of The Gods some if this will make more sense. If you haven't and want to read this, I strongly suggest finding out the basics of that book as it will help. Now when I was 14 and read Erich von Däniken I loved it and at 15 made no small stir when I brought it up in a Christian Ethics class I had no business being in since it was my agnostic phase of life, although the teacher liked it because it provoked good discussion (but 15 year olds aren't always that interested in that sort of talk).

In a nutshell, the premise here is that basically every sentient being in the galaxy except people on earth (more or less) had an evolutionary uplift (hence the trilogy name) toward being sentient beings (my term not Brin's) and then, in turn, after x million years does the same for another species. Earth has gained some brownie points because they have already been doing this with chimps and dolphins (the fact that Brin chose chimps and not a more docile ape is rather foolish, but it's a minor point, I suppose). Now they appear to have found--wait for it--sentient life on the Sun. I swear I am not making this up. Certain beings herd magnetovores (yes, creatures that feed on magnetism) and sundivers are ships that can dive close to the sun without damage (I kid you not and what's more, there are windows in ships and not one mention of radiation in space at all).

But just these, among other things, aside, what made this hard for me, but also somewhat funny, is the writing. Now, you might not mind this sort of writing if the story keeps you interested, but it drives me batty. I have the book to make quotes, but forgot my reading glasses and am not at home; the print is small. Any mistakes are due to the fact that my arms aren't quite long enough.

Re: the first woman we come across in the book here are a couple of quotes, and I only wish I were making this up myself. The first is an assistant in Jacob's (main character) professional, scientific work environment:

"As usual, she was wearing next to nothing. Pretty, well endowed, and with long dark hair, the young biologist wore next to nothing very well." (what's more, and for some this is a spoiler, not much sex actually happening in this book, unlike some classic scifi).

Then, about the same woman thinking about Jacob a couple of pages later:

"Gloria looked after him a moment. She picked up the data charts [fyi, Brin didn't foresee a paperless and audio tape-less future] and wished she knew what it would take to hold the man's interest for more than an hour, or a night."

We eventually come across two women in space, one a scientist and one a ship's captain, but virtually every human and alien is male despite a conversation about how 70 percent of the astronauts on jump ships (some kind of completely unexplained space travel for long distances) are women, the others are mostly me.

But the characters are mostly two dimensional characters with no character growth. There is some on Jacob's part, I suppose, but it is really hard to take the entire process of what that man has going on in his head this far away from the 1970s. As for the aliens, Brin put a great deal of imagination and science into this, but some of it was just hard to take, perhaps because I have read and seen too much of this, particularly newer scifi and better written scifi.

The action scenes weren't that great for me, either, particularly the climactic one. Not even one of them.

Nevertheless, I am not a majority, because he has been named one of the best futurists and various and sundry other things; perhaps his later scifi improves, but I am not likely to read another one of his books ever again unless after I forget his name I see some other book that doesn't mention this one.