Rating: 
Summary: Even One Star is Too Many
Review: This was awful. With all due respect to the reviewer who beleives this was meant in homage to writers like Verne, this was simply a homage to garbage. If you pick this up after having read his previous novels, you will be sorely disappointed. If you don't beleive the large majority of reviewers, and must read it please go to the library and get it. Save your money to buy another copy of the Alienist.
Rating:
Summary: not worth the paper it's written on
Review: Thank goodness I borrowed this book from the library and did not buy it. I share other reviewers dissapointments as I enjoyed Carr's other books - but don't even bother with this one.
Rating:
Summary: Killing Time
Review: Didn't even come close to his other two books. NO imagination or creactivity. A great dissapointment- the plot was very predictable
Rating: 
Summary: Too Much Information (& Then Not Enough)
Review: Caleb Carr is a strong writer. His prose is very engaging and, even here, in a book I did not really care for, his writing has the ability to pull you along. That made this book an easy read; however, this simply is not a high quality story--certainly no where near the excellence of The Alienist or even The Angel of Darkness.Perhaps I read too much science fiction in my younger days but Carr seems a little out of his league here. As I read this book I thought of something I'd read by a science fiction author/critic awhile back (I can't remember who--maybe Lester del Rey or Orson Scott Card?) who said that a science fiction writer was allowed one "impossible" thing when imagining the future--for example, faster than light travel--and everything else had to center around that. Otherwise the reader wouldn't be able to suspend his disbelief. The story would contain too much information to absorb. That seems to be the trap into which Carr has fallen. There are so many things that are possible that Carr has created--computer-altered assasinations, anti-gravity ships, genetically-altered superhumans, etc.--but all together in one story it is too difficult to take it all. It seems a mismash of possible futures rather that one well-developed possible future. And then he finishes with the unforgivable sin of a world changed by time-travel--and he doesn't even tell us what was changed and how it could have created this new world--and he tops it with making that new world a better one. True, Carr gives us a lot of interesting things to think about but I guess I don't like my dystopian futures topped with a happy ending.
Rating:
Summary: The worst book ever!
Review: This is undeniably the most terrible book I have ever read. It reads like a SuperFriends cartoon episode. I enjoyed Angel of Darkness, heard Alienist was good and thought I would try this new one out. I even gave the book as a gift to a friend before reading it myself. Big mistake! I have since told my friend not to bother and promised to buy another book as a gift right away! I could go on and on with specifics. But feel most of my complaints were well captured by the reviews already written above. I will just add one comment regarding the characters: none of the characters were developed, other than emulating the good/evil of classic cartoon-like characters. I often found myself bursting out loud with laughter at the hokey-ness of the story. I listened to an audiobook version (as I am trapped in the car 2 hours per day in my commute). Caleb Carr was the narrator and did the most horrendous accents as well. I feel completely cheated after reading this book.
Rating:
Summary: Jules Verne meets Orwell meets Barbarella in the worst way
Review: Let me preface this review by saying that the only reason I actually made it all the way through this book was that I brought it with me to an all-day "corporate vision" presentation. Otherwise, I'd have thrown it out a window in disgust after the first chapter. This book is offensive to women, science fiction fans, Caleb Carr fans, and probably everybody else as well. This is one of those books that makes you grab your head and wail "WHAT was he THINKING?" I actually think I know what he was thinking. I think he was trying to draw on several classic themes and write a real old-school science fiction novel. Unfortunately, he failed utterly. At first, Carr seemed to be trying to write in the style of Jules Verne. His prose lends itself to such an approach; the protagonist is going about his business and is suddenly drawn into a strange world of high technology, adventure, and intrigue, which he describes in very much the way someone from the author's previous novels might -- more as a tourist than as a participant. Things don't happen *to* this character, they happen more around him, or adjacent to him, or on the same page as him. The 'science' bits were glossed over a bit too much and it was obviously not a book written by an actual science fiction writer, but it wasn't too bad. Yet. Then the eco-preaching and doomsaying commenced. Ah, now we're in Orwell territory, I thought. He's using this as a platform to spew paranoia about how humanity is going to destroy the world. A trite theme, poorly executed. No stars. I was losing interest fast... ...at which point, he introduced the book's only female character, who comes across as sort of a shallow caricature of Barbarella, if that's possible. This character has no personality or depth of any kind -- she exists solely as a sex toy for the Carr's protagonist. In true 50's pulp fashion, she's a super-brilliant scientist who also happens to be incredibly beautiful and falls in love with Our Hero on sight. She immediately seduces him; the scene reads like a 14-year-old's fantasy. He's later shocked to discover she's also a trained assassin. I hoped Carr would use this twist to develop something resembling an actual *character* for her, but instead he simply drops the information and moves on, and later has her flinging herself sobbing into the protagonist's arms like any good pulp sci-fi bimbo. One can't even manage to like the protagonist, who has little depth of his own, allows himself to be drawn into an obviously psychotic and immoral plot with no real explanation, and instantly falls for the conveniently placed bimbo simply because she decides she wants him to -- thereby making him nearly as offensive a caricature. None of the other characters even have enough personality for me to remember them, except of course the Well-Intentioned but Misguided Mad Genius (but alas, that's all there is to him). In other words, it's a bad book. I won't bother trying to explain the storyline, which is flat, uninteresting, and doesn't really hold together anyway. Some stuff happens, the world is saved, blah blah blah. The only interesting twist (which might also be referred to as a negation of the protagonist's entire purpose) is at the end, so I won't ruin it for you. Take my word for it, though, it's not interesting enough to make through sitting through the rest of the book.
Rating: 
Summary: Suspenseful Sci-fi with a grain of plausiblity, MUST READ
Review: I think this book has been given a bum rap by a lot of readers. I think it is wonderful when a writer comes out of his niche and writes in a different style. I really enjoyed this book, I read the whole book in a day and 1/2, I couldn't put it down. What I liked most about it, is it had a grain of truth, I could picture it realistically happening, in the future. It had a happy ending. The style of it reminded me of Ken Follett's Code to Zero or some of Dean Koontz early books. Give it a chance.
Rating:
Summary: Let the Buyer Beware
Review: Caleb Carr is (was?) my favorite "B" novelist. *The Alienist* and *The Angel of Darkness* were both superb entertainments. So when I saw a this new book with the ever-so-tempting dust jacket and the author's name, I hestitated not an instant. Would that I had been warned!! This book is astonishingly bad. I venture that no publisher would have touched it had it been written before CC's earlier triumphs. What happened??? First of all, the novel is tediously didactic. It's essentially a diatribe against the internet -- not a novel concept. Second, the plot is absolutely ridiculous. Never mind suspending your disbelief. There's nothing to suspend it *on*. Meaning there are no hooks. Nothing interesting happens. It would be a compliment to call these characters two-dimensional. They are not even cartoons. They are simply excuses for CC to indulge himself in a surprisingly simplistic and paranoid raves about what he apparently sees as an ominous forecast for a future without peer review. Well. Here's a peer review: This book sucks. Third -- it's puerile. Does anyone suppose that the "discovery" of a "lost gospel" would be a threat to Christianity? A miniscule amount of research would have revealed the existence of hundreds of "lost gospels." Woops. This is just one minor example of the laziness of this surpisingly cynical exercise in what can only be the author's and publisher's self-conscious (and unforgivable) decision to exploit Carr's heretofore loyal readership. Are there any editors left? Fourth -- whenever anything has to happen to advance the "plot" of this tedious thriller, the author just invents new magical things that the spaceship can do. If this were a comic book, 9-year old boys would snicker. Please. Finally, the book, for all its moralism, is perversely void. To say that it lacks a moral compass is to say too little. It is a wicked book. The "good" guys do very bad things to innocent people to advance their more than questionable worldview. And they do it with money, mass deception and the very technology that they supposedly eschew. One would expect this author at least to have grasped the irony of all this. I kept waiting for it. Alas. CC seems, amazingly, to take himself seriously. Frankly, I was flummoxed. So my advice: Avoid this lead-handed tripe at all costs. If you've already bought it, don't lend it, don't give it away, just throw it in the trash with a glad cry and be done with it.
Rating:
Summary: Caleb Carr should have known better.
Review: I had heard the praises of Carr's earlier work (and still intend to read those books), but I was spurred on to buy and read KILLING TIME after reading his laughably controversial essay in Salon and his own promotion of the book. I'm a sucker for dystopian fantasies; there's nothing like large-scale wallowing in doom and despair stories for the whole race. Three pages in I was wondering how anything so clunky and hackneyed could have made it to print (then I remembered the Left Behind series and decided anything will make it to print these days if it contains a couple of complete sentences). Many folks I know have idle daydreams of the one or two great discoveries or events that will change the world, or the discovery or patronage of deceptively simple solutions to all of humanity's problems. I imagine these sweeping epics myself sometimes as I drift off to sleep. Most of us have better sense than to put these ramblings to paper and attempt to sell them as literature, though, or at least not in so poor a form. Even trying to read this book in a 19th-century/industrial age novel of ideas mode, it doesn't work. The science is bad, the characters are unappealing and flat, and the whole book is laden with inconsistent pacing and expository dialogue the likes of which I haven't read since the comic books of the 1970s. In fact, if you threw out all of the verbiage and handed the story over to someone like Alan Moore or Bryan Talbot, you might actually get something readable in comics form. As it stands, this is almost a cross between Jules Verne's best (he may as well have named the airship the Nautilus) and Grant Morrisson's THE INVISIBLES, with the added detriment of a Friday-esque female costar, which didn't work for Heinlein and doesn't work here. Perhaps, given the time period of his previous novels, Carr had ideas of paying homage to Verne and Doyle with this book. Perhaps if he'd given it the room he gave his other stories he'd have put together a better novel, both fictionally and philosophically. Instead, what we have here only tells us something we already know -- don't believe everything you read -- and doesn't even do it in an entertaining fashion. Mundus vult decipi, indeed, Mr. Carr.
Rating:
Summary: Must agree with the majority....it stunk
Review: I'm sure most people will have figured out the average reader response by the time that they get to my review, but I couldn't resist adding my two cents. This book was just plain bad. It was a Jules Verne/H.G. Wells wanna-be and it was a gigantic disappointment after The Alienist and The Angel of Darkness. The characters were one dimensional and the dialogue was forced and silly. It felt like it wanted to be a Michael Crichton style techie-book but Carr just didn't seem to have the talent to get to the meat of the story. I plowed my way through it because I liked his other books and I suffer from that guilty feeling when I don't give an author a chance...but I should've quit reading when I started to realize it was lame...after two chapters. Go check out the latest Jeff Deaver reprints if you want a good story...avoid this at all costs.
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