Meg

Rating:
Summary: Like Reading an Action-Movie Script
Review: From its gruesome beginning to its sequel-setting end, MEG read like an action-movie script. It was very sophmorish with junior high dialouge and humor in places, but I couldn't bring myself to put it down. The action was fast-paced and believable, if you are willing to leave reality somewhere else for three days. I liked it and believe that it will make your stomach turn while leaving a smile on your face. It's far from being a contemporary classic (Jaws, Jurassic Park), but I feel comfortable giving it three stars for the pure thrill and enjoyment of the experience.

Rating:
Summary: It's Fiction People
Review: Before I actually give my own impression of this book I'd first like to take issue with some of the reviews I've read, especially the review by Richard Ellis. It's fiction people. A writer of fiction depends on something called 'suspension of disbelief'. The readers/viewers ability to accept and assimilate fictional information in order to support a fictional account of events. Last time I checked no one had actually cloned and created Michael Crichton's dinosaurs nor had medical science accomplished the re-animation of dead tissue as seen in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. I think Mr. Ellis should stick to such riveting reads as Popular Mechanics, Gray's Anatomy, and perhaps Webster's Dictionary as to not offend his sensibilities. You've probably got an imagination tucked away somewhere, use it.

Meg is an entertaining read provided that you take it for what it is, an amusement park ride. It's fun. Its dialogue is not as fluid as Shakespere's and its facts are not as solid and dry as an owners manual, but they're not meant to be. Like I've said, it's fiction. Fact and fiction are different, that's why there's a non-fiction section. Steve Alten has a flare for writing action scenes and, as there are so many, that ability makes for a quick read. I've put plenty of books down after one chapter and never picked them up again however I finished Meg in a little over one day. The most interesting character in the book is the monster, which is fine. Chances are if you've picked this book up you're probably one of those people who make a point to watch 'shark week' on the Discovery Channel and you've seen Jaws more times than you can count. You want a scary shark story and Alten delivers. I can't argue with some reviews that have taken issue with the books ending. Yeah, it's over the top, but excusable. I for one am looking forward to the books translation to the big screen (studios are vying for the movie rights as we speak). If interested Alten has a decent website, ..., where you can view CGI generated storyboards from some of the more memorable scenes in the book.

Rating:
Summary: It was good at first...
Review: According to Alten, MEG was meant to be "fast-paced and fun, but believable." Indeed, MEG was an interesting and addictive book to read. Even for a amateur leisure reader like myself, I found it to be more appealing than television. However, as I reached the concluding chapters of this novel, I felt as if I was not given a closure that was consistent with the rest of the book. Throughout the novel I was given the impression that Alten was going for a believable story line. MEG uses much scientific evidence and devotes much of itself towards helping the reader believe all its events. By the time I reached the end of the novel, I was trying to decide exactly what level of realism the book was meant to be at. It stood on two conflicting levels, and in my opinion no book can pull this off. If I were aware of this jump in realism before I read the book, I would not have put myself through reading it. I would not recommend this book to anyone. Even though MEG was successful in entertaining me through the majority of its pages, the let-down at the end ruins the whole experience. Spare yourself the pain and don't pick up this book.

Rating:
Summary: sharkyyy
Review: This is a great book! I picked it up a while back. If You like great whites, this is better! this is megalodon!
Great for nerds...

Rating:
Summary: Meg
Review: For any of you fascinated by sharks, the reality and the myth, this book is great reading. Very compelling and linked to actual fact with some healthy fictional items thrown in. Great to see a trilogy, haven't read The Trench yet but the reviews are good and looking forward to Primal Waters

Rating:
Summary: Meg is a fun read
Review: I thought 'Meg' was a really fun read. It was highly entertaining, fast-paced and packed with action. Yes, it wasn't perfect - but hey, for his first novel, Steve Alten did pretty damn good.
Of course, when I read the scene where the Meg eats the T.rex, it was deeply disturbing - since a T.rex never would've encountered a Meg (they're separated by over 40 million years in the fossil record) - but hey, what if!? And heck, it was a cool scene! And a great way to open a novel. After all, this is a work of fiction -
As soon as I finished 'Meg' I went out and bought 'The Trench', and I found that to be just as entertaining. As far as sequels go, it was right on. Of course, Alten does do some more crazy things with paleontology (Kronosaurs w/ gills . . . ) but hey, it was cool to read. And I think they would both be awesome summer movies.
If I was looking for something to scrutinize for scientific accuracy and plausibilty, I'd go buy the latest 'National Geographic'. If I want fast paced, action packed entertainment w/ some cool thrills and some far out twists on biology/geology (which are interesting, if highly unlikely) - I'll go buy a Steve Alten novel.

Rating:
Summary: Absolutely ridiculous.
Review: Ever since the 1975 publication of the blockbuster novel Jaws, and the hugely successful movie directed by Steven Spielberg, authors have tried to improve on Peter Benchley's formula for success. If a 25-foot shark could generate all that money, think of what a 100-footer could do. Or a 200-footer!

There is no shark that is 100 feet long, but it so happens that the star of Jaws, the great white shark (scientific name: Carcharodon carcharias), has a relative -- or rather, had a relative -- that may have reached a length of 50 feet. This is the creature known as Carcharodon megalodon, megalodon means "giant tooth." The largest known teeth of the white shark are about 2 inches in height, but fossil teeth of C. megalodon have been found that measure 6 inches long. All the C. megalodon teeth ever found have been fossils; dark gray, brown, or black, and they are made of stone, not dentine. The fact that no fresh C. megalodon teeth have ever been found strongly suggests that this giant relative of the white shark is extinct. Of course, there is no way of conclusively proving that this monster does not exist, and this is the stuff that giant shark novels are made of.

In 1983, Robin Brown wrote a novel he called "Megalodon," which was about a 200-foot long ancestor of the great white shark that was blind, covered with a coat of crustaceans, and living at great depths. In 1987, George Edward Noe self-published a little number he called "Carcharodon," in which the giant shark has been imprisoned for a couple of million years in an iceberg that thaws, and all hell breaks loose because the shark is really hungry. It goes on a rampage like its predecessors in Brown's book, and before we are finished, we have the marine biologist hero renting a Norwegian whaling ship and shooting the shark with a grenade harpoon. This year's "Extinct" by Charles Wilson with a jacket advertisement that ominously warns, "Coming to NBC-TV," is set on the Gulf coast of Mississippi. Even though Wilson gives us a whole new setting, we still have the same old stuff about a gigantic shark rising from the depths with its gaping maw -- these guys love to write "gaping maw" -- to pluck unwary children and fishermen from the water.

Surely the worst of all the titles is "Meg" -- it sounds more like a nanny than a man eating shark -- published by Doubleday with all the fanfare of another "Jaws" or "Jurassic Park." Indeed, the advance reading copy that I have in front of me is emblazoned with every sort of encomium and sales pitch, such as the following: "If Peter Benchley, Michael Crichton, and Clive Cussler were to combine their talents to create the ultimate summer read, MEG would be the result -- an electrifying page turner that will keep more people out of the water than "Jaws."

Don't they wish. Not only is it not the slightest bit terrifying, it is unintentionally, hilariously funny, largely because almost every page contains a genuine howler. Whenever the author discusses biology, paleontology, oceanography, or any other recognized scientific subject, he gets it wrong. It is obvious that Alten equipped himself with a book about sharks, a study of submersibles, some weirdly off-base material about whales, and everything that Peter Benchley, Michael Crichton, and Clive Cussler ever wrote, and then mixed them together to produce an almost totally incoherent story, in which the human characters make no sense, the sharks and whales behave like unknown animals from the planet Zarkon, and the technology sounds like a cross between Rube Goldberg and Buck Rogers.

I am not talking only about arcane scientific constructs that only an ichthyologist would notice; I am talking about sentences like this: "his foot knocked over the empty coffee pot, staining the beige carpet brown." Or: "The Megalodon could detect the faint electrical field of its prey's beating heart or moving muscles hundreds of miles away." On page 109 they approach the carcass of a "dead humpback whale." Two pages later it has become a "dead Orca."

One of the more imaginative inventions in the C. megalodon canon is Alten's explanation for why the giant sharks have remained unnoticed for so long. It seems that they live in the very deepest part of the ocean, the bottom of the Mariana Trench, which has somehow become a hydrothermal vent area, bubbling with superheated water. "The water temperature above the warm layer," he writes, "is near freezing. The Meg could never survive the transition through the cold in order to surface." Whoa! What happened to physics as we know it? Only in Alten's topsy-turvy world can there be a situation where warmer water remains below colder water. There is no way Alten could have written this nonsense unless he had convinced himself that it wouldn't matter if he played fast and loose with reality. "Listen man," you can hear the author say, "this is fiction -- I get to make stuff up."

Like this phantasmagorical description of the monster shark: "... it's totally white, actually luminescent. This is a common genetic adaptation to its environment where no light exists."

As a helicopter hovers above this luminescent monster, "The Megalodon launched straight out of the sea like an intercontinental ballistic missile, flying at the hovering helicopter faster than [the pilot] could increase his altitude... Only the seat belt kept his body from falling into the night where the garage-sized head closed quickly, its fangs five feet away."

In another encounter, the shark approaches a submarine that, "at 3,000 tons easily outweighed her. But the Meg could swim and change course faster than her adversary; moreover, no adult Megalodon would allow a challenge to its rule to go unanswered. Approaching from above, the female accelerated at the sub's hull like a berserk, sixty-foot locomotive. BOOM!!"

As might be expected, the shark is dispatched by an intrepid marine biologist, but nothing in this ridiculous book compares with Alten's unbelievable conclusion. The hero, named Jonas Taylor (Jonas -- I ask you!) is in his one-man submersible when, like the biblical Jonah, he gets swallowed by the shark. He climbs out of the submarine, reaches into his backpack where he always carries a fossil C. megalodon tooth, and he carves up the shark up and kills it from the inside. Then he climbs back into the submarine (which he re-locates by shining his flashlight around in the belly of the shark) and ejects himself from the shark's mouth. As Dave Barry says, I'm not making this up.

Under ordinary circumstances, a book as terrible as this would hardly be noticed, or at least, it would be recognized for what it is: a stepping-stone to a Hollywood extravaganza with expensive special effects, throbbing music, and plenty of blood. But "Meg" is being hyped so hysterically that it doesn't matter if it makes any sense or even if it's readable. It's enough that it's about a giant shark that glows in the dark, launches itself like an ICBM, and eats 14 whales at a time.

When Doubleday published Jaws in 1975, they paid Peter Benchley an advance in the mid-four figures. Now the same publisher has joined the ranks of those who can twist their own definition of literature (there must be another name for this stuff) to justify paying a million dollars for this outrageously awful book, crammed with egregious errors of fact, and stuffed to the gills with writing so awful that it would insult the intelligence of a sea cucumber.

And the most embarrassing thing about all of this is that they -- and the author -- are proud of what they have done. On the flap of the copy I have, somebody wrote, "Steve Alten's story is an inspiring tale of perseverance against the odds, and the power of a good yarn. In a single month, he went from being an unemployed father of three with $48 in the bank to a multi-millionaire author and screen writer." Doubleday was obviously looking for another Jaws to make it rich. For publishing this rubbish, it ought to be ashamed of itself. I am more than a little embarrassed to see than in his author's note, Alten acknowledges me and John McCosker for our book "Great White Shark" as "an excellent source of information on both Megalodons and great whites." If "Meg" is what we spawned, then we ought to be ashamed of ourselves too.

Rating:
Summary: Great
Review: Once again, Mr. Alten has astounded me at the research gone into his novels, I have read "Domain" and I thought that was superb, but "Meg" exceeds it by far. His books are just so exciting, they have a the thrill of a Clive Cussler novel. This book is a must for everybody who is able to read. I look forward to reading "The Trench".

Rating:
Summary: Exciting. Silly ending.
Review: When I go on a long drive I look for a book on tape which is action oriented. That way, when I miss several paragraphs while looking for my turn, I don't really miss anything.
This fits the bill nicely. It has a great monster.
If I had bought the book I would have torn out the last twenty or thirty pages. The ending was totally ridiculous.

Rating:
Summary: Great book, ridiculous ending
Review: I am an avid fan of Shark fiction. I have read Jaws, Extinct, and Meg. I wish their were more shark fiction books. Meg was great. It is a great read if you want to just sit back and allow yourself to be taken away with an easy read and a great story. The only problem I have with this book is the ridiculous ending. I really can't say enough about it. It is the most unbvleivable, out of control ending I have ever read! It didn't spoil the whole book but I was laughing and couldn't believe that this book had this ending. The story of how a Megalodon has survived so long is so clever that I would almost think a different author penned the ending. It is still worth the read but just note that the ending sounds like a 'Rose' story from St. Olaf!