Abduction

Rating:
Summary: Homophobic rednecks get bored in Brave New World?
Review: As a sci-fi short story, this might have worked -- it even has a twilight-zonish ending. But as a full-length novel, it was a big disappointment. I have read every other book by Robin Cook and this was the first one I did not like. Hopefully it will be the last such bomb.

There isn't any real horror in this novel -- unless you consider boredom to be a form of torture. The plot is a hackneyed new-age mish-mash of Brave New World, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and the Time Machine (only this time, the good guys went underground, er, undersea.) The characters are shallow and the "science" is utterly ridiculous -- how many times can you say, in essence, "This is so far advanced it's way beyond me..."?

Then there's the lack of good descriptive prose. In Cook's previous books, we can get inside the characters' heads and really FEEL what they are going through. In this book, the plot is carried forward through preachy dialogue and "orientations" that drove me up the wall. Every good science fiction writer knows that the Absolute WORST way to explain things in an alternate world is to have some scientist or tour guide give a lecture.

PLEASE, please, Dr. Cook -- go back to writing medical horror!

Rating:
Summary: A Different Side of Robin Cook
Review: I began reading Robin Cook books when I was in junior high, and have since been addicted to them. I was looking for something I hadn't read to take with me on vacation, and picked up Abduction. Because I'm a Robin Cook fan, I was hesitant to read something other than a medical murder mystery, but I was definitely taken in by Abduction.

The opening of the book takes you out to the sea, where scientists are drilling through the earth's core. All of a sudden there is a halt in the drilling due to a bit breaking, and the scientists and divers are forced to go deep below the ocean to examine the problem.

As the plot evolves, the divers and scientists are "abducted" by a mysterious force; they find themselves in a cave (below or above the earth? you'll find out!), only to come a huge metalic door. They open it, and are put through a series of purification processes that appear outer-wordly and completely advanced.

They soon learn that they have been taken by a society living underneath the earth's core, a utopian world not unlike Eden where everything seems possible. Everything, however, seems too perfect. The sci-fi thriller ends with a surprising, though somewhat predictable, conclusion.

Although I agree that the characters are pretty stereotypical (and even a bit prejudice if you ask me), this book has a good moral to it. If you're looking for a quick beach-side read, this is for you. If you're a huge Robin Cook fan, this is for you. If you're looking to read a good Robin Cook novel, don't start with Abduction (try Coma).

Rating:
Summary: Robin Cook is a Genious!
Review: Le me begin by saying that if you're new to Robin Cook, do not start with this novel. It is nothing like any of his other novels since it is not a medical thriller.

This book begins fairly slow and send the reader in the wrong direction. I don't want to say more because I'll be giving it away.

You will NEVER guess how it ends!!!

Rating:
Summary: Ridiculous tale
Review: Let me summarize the story for you so you don't waste time on this book. Five divers/scientists go deep into the Atlantic Ocean, and become abducted by another species of humans who live in a large air-filled cavity under the seas. The "aliens" are a happy people who abhor violence, and who transfer their souls from body to body to live forever. The "aliens" also have advanced technology which is difficult to explain (for example, why do they use lights to set up artificial days and nights?). Our ordinary human heroes want to escape. The ending is particularly ridiculous, and comes across as Dr Cook ran out of time to think of how to wrap up this crazy story.

Rating:
Summary: Saturday afternoon matinee stuff
Review: Perhaps I'm not the ideal person to be reviewing this book as I've never read sci-fi stuff but, as I picked this up, thinking it was another of Dr.Cook's medical murder mysteries and found myself in another world..one underwater and the precursor to Atlantis, peopled by incredibly beautiful, ageless people, I couldn't help but be taken back to Saturday afternoon matinees at the Progress theatre.It read almost exactly like a Buck Rogers adventure and all it needed was an appearance by Ming the Merciless!! A beautiful marine biologist(and when aren't they beautiful?)is with an undersea exploration party when they are drawn into a deep fissure in an undersea mountain and their mini submarine is taken to a different world by means of water tight caverns. Ye gods..enough said !!!

Rating:
Summary: Dr Cook is no Jules Verne...
Review: Perry Bergman, founder, president and largest shareholder of Benthic Marine is on its way on board the Benthic Explorer near the volcanically and seismically active Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Using the submarine Oceanus, the crew is working on their current project: drilling into a magma chamber within a seamount west of the Azores.
One day, in the Oceanus, the crew come across a strange and deep hole that looks like an opening into an extinct volcano when suddenly the submarine looses its buoyancy and is inexorably sucked into the abyss. And so the members of the crew are about to enter the futuristic world of Inteterra.
Jules Verne wrote an infinitely more refined book, "Voyage to the Center of the Earth", in 1864! Maybe Dr Cook should concentrate on what is his speciality: medicine.

Rating:
Summary: One of his best
Review: Perry Bergman, president of Benthic Marine, is holding station in his ship Benthic Explorer above an anomaly discovered on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. He joins Dr. Suzanne Newell and Commander Donald Fuller in a submersible dive to the site and to those on the surface the submersible disappears without a trace, but the trio are not dead. They wake in a futuristic chamber and meet their hosts, the Interterrans, who live beneath the ocean floor in a place called Interterra.

These Interterrans are the non-violent first generation humans and this is a story that is pretty hard to take in, though I must admit that I read it in one sitting. I suppose that's because even if Robin Cook is writing about something as far fetched as this, it's still a Robin Cook book and they are so well written that you willingly believe the unbelievable.

Review written by Devon Adams, the Cool Kid

Rating:
Summary: Skip this novel and read H.G. Wells' The Time Machine!
Review: This book is an example of a failed experiment that probably would not have sold except for its having been written by an already commercially successful writer. Once a writer is a success, the publishers stop requiring good editing, which is what this book needs.

The story interested me enough that I finished the book, but only to find out if anything interesting would happen to the characters, and if they would ever grow from their experiences. Plenty of things happened to the characters; few of those things were interesting, mainly because the characters are one dimensional paper dolls dressed up like fictional cliches.

The characters include a couple of low-life, crude, violent bubbas, a pretty female scientist, a hard-edged military man, and a corporate president. No matter what happens to them, they stay in their designated roles with little emotional response and no character growth despite their traumatic experiences. The corporate president is a oddly out of place, with the literary voice of an insecure adolescent. He judges people by whether their teeth are as white as his own, for gosh sakes! I found him completely devoid of credibility, not in the sense of a shrewd but distrustful executive, but in the sense that I was unable to buy the premise that a man of his limited intellect, beset with so many inner misgivings, could have succeeded as head of the school lunch committee, not to mention a global drilling operation.

When this group is sucked under the bed of the ocean into what appears to be a peace and love Utopia, they run around wreaking their normal havoc and staying true to their flat character traits until the ending, during which I thought, for a moment, that I would be reading a remake of the appearance of the buried Statue of Liberty at the end of Planet of the Apes.

Suspending practicality and belief long enough to enjoy a fantasy is a fine and honorable pleasure, but only if the characters have enough passion to connect the writer to the experience. Sorry, that never happens here. When I reached the end, I felt I had wasted my time reading this book. I find it sad that the commercial aspect of publishing requires good writers to pump out lame work in the interest of sales.

If you want to read a good book about people venturing into the center of the earth, read H. G. Wells' The Time Machine, which is actually given a nod within Cook's Abduction.

Rating:
Summary: Abduction, or "My 8th Grade Creative Writing Assignment"
Review: This book is terrible. A plot line driven mainly by homophobia, underground humans cleverly named "interrans," unflinching use of exclamation points, and absolutely no character development at all makes for one of the worst reads EVER. The only reason I finished was that I kept thinking: "This has to get interesting at some point, right?." Alas, no.

Rating:
Summary: Ghastly space opera
Review: This is a book that might even have had trouble being published in the 40's, the heyday of space opera. The script would probably not have been accepted for a very bad episode of "Star Trek." That is has been published at all, in any decade, is a mind-boggling tribute only to the venality of publishers who will count on a well-known name to sell any old drek. That any respectable writer would allow this donkey to go to print is inexplicable, save that he suspects he will never write another book so doesn't care. The 'human' characters are trite, shallow and stupid, the 'alien' characters are idiotic, the plot - such as it is - is mind-numbingly predictable, the suspense and tension are zero. I give it one star for grammar and spelling. It deserves far less.