Sailing Bright Eternity

Rating:
Summary: Thank God it's over!
Review: After struggling for months, I finally got through the Galactic Center "epic" (and I use the word loosely) by Gregory Benford. To say that the series was a major let-down doesn't half-cover it. I've read a lot of sci-fi novels, and I can't remember being that disappointed before, except with the works of Linda Nagata and Howard Hendricks (both certified 0-starers, IMHO). Let's see...

First of all, the characters are despairingly two-dimensional (make that one, for some). You don't know what they're here for and, frankly, you don't very much care. The story (or lack thereof) is strange to say the least: despite raves such as "no holds-barred adventure", nothing much happens, so that the books are marginally less thrilling than a 2,000-page financial report. (The focus of the story is a giant black hole at the center of the galaxy, and I can't help wondering whether that prompted Mr Benford to write books which are so empty of meaning. And to think that he needed almost twenty years to produce them!)

I won't even speak of the way a 30,000+ war against mechs (yuck!) is resolved in 3 minutes flat. I know it ain't over till the fat lady sings, but still...

Some aliens are interesting, but the story moves along and leaves them behind each time you think you're going to learn something about them! So tell me - why are they here? As filler? Hum. (For example, the best part of the series is, for me, the novella-size sea adventure of Warren in book two. But the aliens he meets are never spoken of again, and Warren himself disappears from the story after that. So, once again, what's the point?)

And the esty - a collection of places/times where/when one of the characters wanders for about 100 pages, meeting all kinds of people who don't have anything to do with the story. The first time is painful enough, but Mr. Benford does it to you *three* times in a row! A piece of advice if I may, Mr Benford: next time you want to write a book, please wait until you've got a real story, and not some disjointed ideas to mix randomly, because the resulting mix can be awful. And the philosophy of it! "The thing about aliens is, they're alien." Wow! OK, but once would be enough, don't you think? Why rehash it every ten pages or so?

If they awarded a price for "best disappointment of the year", this book (indeed, the whole series) would win it hands down...

Rating:
Summary: Thank God it's over!
Review: After struggling for months, I finally got through the Galactic Center "epic" (and I use the word loosely) by Gregory Benford. To say that the series was a major let-down doesn't half-cover it. I've read a lot of sci-fi novels, and I can't remember being that disappointed before, except with the works of Linda Nagata and Howard Hendricks (both certified 0-starers, IMHO). Let's see...

First of all, the characters are despairingly two-dimensional (make that one, for some). You don't know what they're here for and, frankly, you don't very much care. The story (or lack thereof) is strange to say the least: despite raves such as "no holds-barred adventure", nothing much happens, so that the books are marginally less thrilling than a 2,000-page financial report. (The focus of the story is a giant black hole at the center of the galaxy, and I can't help wondering whether that prompted Mr Benford to write books which are so empty of meaning. And to think that he needed almost twenty years to produce them!)

I won't even speak of the way a 30,000+ war against mechs (yuck!) is resolved in 3 minutes flat. I know it ain't over till the fat lady sings, but still...

Some aliens are interesting, but the story moves along and leaves them behind each time you think you're going to learn something about them! So tell me - why are they here? As filler? Hum. (For example, the best part of the series is, for me, the novella-size sea adventure of Warren in book two. But the aliens he meets are never spoken of again, and Warren himself disappears from the story after that. So, once again, what's the point?)

And the esty - a collection of places/times where/when one of the characters wanders for about 100 pages, meeting all kinds of people who don't have anything to do with the story. The first time is painful enough, but Mr. Benford does it to you *three* times in a row! A piece of advice if I may, Mr Benford: next time you want to write a book, please wait until you've got a real story, and not some disjointed ideas to mix randomly, because the resulting mix can be awful. And the philosophy of it! "The thing about aliens is, they're alien." Wow! OK, but once would be enough, don't you think? Why rehash it every ten pages or so?

If they awarded a price for "best disappointment of the year", this book (indeed, the whole series) would win it hands down...

Rating:
Summary: Too many irrelevant characters. Too long. Too tedious.
Review: Gregory Benford is a smart guy. It shows. The problem is when he tries to show us just how smart he is. This book shouldnt be approached unless the reader is armed with a Ph.D in astro physics. Benford introduces the concept of an esty, and although central to the plot and events of the novel, Benford does a bad job of making the etsy (is it a time? place? neither?) comprehensible to the average reader.

Also, the book isnt helped by the way Benford devotes entire chapters to events and characters, who are memorable only for the degree to which they turn out to be irrelevant. A very disapointing end to a very promising series.

Rating:
Summary: Satisfying conclusion to a grand series!
Review: I started reading Benford's "Galactic Center" novels when the first one (Into the Ocean of Night) came out. I loved the first three, but the two prior to "Sailing" became slightly tedious, although they were good enough to keep me reading and to buy the next ones as they appeared. "Sailing" has it flaws and excesses (I became very impatient with the "Life on the Missisippi" part), but overall it is a great novel and a fitting end to the impressive series. I loved the re-appearance of good old Nigel, as well as Nikka (although, again, the "Little House on the Prairie/in the ESTY" was a bit hard to take). I am a psychopharmacologist and a biological psychologist, and Benford's observations about human brain function and some of our biological underpinnings were right on the mark, and were woven into the story in a masterful way. I suspect that some of his astrophysics speculation, while apparently based on our current knowledge, may be a bit...weak? chintzy? - but still, this is great hard sci-fi. In the summary or synopsis of the 30,000+ stretch of time covered in the series,(at the very end of the book), it is apparent that there could be many other stories told about this sequence... for instance, some of the things happening on Earth as the mechs made successive attacks and before the humans departed for galactic center. Also, what, if anything was left of old earth 30,000 years later. I suppose the best indicator of how much I like this conclusion of the series is that I dug out my old copy of the first novel in the series, and then found the second (Across the sea of suns) in a used book store, so I coul re-read both of them. "Sailing" has a few flaws, but overall it is grand in scope and a dynamite book. I am Perry Duncan, and I live in Norfolk, Virginia.

Rating:
Summary: Satisfying conclusion to a grand series!
Review: I started reading Benford's "Galactic Center" novels when the first one (Into the Ocean of Night) came out. I loved the first three, but the two prior to "Sailing" became slightly tedious, although they were good enough to keep me reading and to buy the next ones as they appeared. "Sailing" has it flaws and excesses (I became very impatient with the "Life on the Missisippi" part), but overall it is a great novel and a fitting end to the impressive series. I loved the re-appearance of good old Nigel, as well as Nikka (although, again, the "Little House on the Prairie/in the ESTY" was a bit hard to take). I am a psychopharmacologist and a biological psychologist, and Benford's observations about human brain function and some of our biological underpinnings were right on the mark, and were woven into the story in a masterful way. I suspect that some of his astrophysics speculation, while apparently based on our current knowledge, may be a bit...weak? chintzy? - but still, this is great hard sci-fi. In the summary or synopsis of the 30,000+ stretch of time covered in the series,(at the very end of the book), it is apparent that there could be many other stories told about this sequence... for instance, some of the things happening on Earth as the mechs made successive attacks and before the humans departed for galactic center. Also, what, if anything was left of old earth 30,000 years later. I suppose the best indicator of how much I like this conclusion of the series is that I dug out my old copy of the first novel in the series, and then found the second (Across the sea of suns) in a used book store, so I coul re-read both of them. "Sailing" has a few flaws, but overall it is grand in scope and a dynamite book. I am Perry Duncan, and I live in Norfolk, Virginia.

Rating:
Summary: Tedious finale to a work that could have been great.
Review: Mr. Gregory Benford is a talented author. His novel Timescape is evidence enough. In fact, this particular series began well, with the story of Killeen Bishop and his embattled tribe, fighting a desperate, bleeding war against the interesting "mechs." The next three volumes (or is it four? five?) however show the plot to be on a montonically decreasing curve, increasingly stuffed with the latest physics mumbo-jumbo, and wow gee science in the best tradition of popular mechanics, at the cost of character development and story line. This last volume is indeed the worst. I found myself caring little about Mr. Bishop and his son, the accompanying cyber-a(u)nt that keeps slipping in and out of esty's, whatever the hell they are. And Nigel Walmsley. Of course there has to be such a character in all such stories spanning a godzillion years. He is the guy who remembers what the word "coffee" meant, or that people travelled in "subways", and other nuggets to keep the cosmic brouhaha in perspective. It seems to me that Mr.Benford wrote two different sets of stories, and then couldn't resist the fatal impulse to merge unlikely situations and characters into one huge, ugly heap. Consider: the mechs attack the humans in the early 21st century, and humans not only survive but even capture a scouting ship, and drive it to the center of the galaxy. Huh uh. Mr. Benford takes tired old themes from Dawkin's memes argument, Cairns-Smith's "we came from clay" theory, Turing's "no virus checker is possible" result, and the result is a Maalox moment. 30,000 years into the future and we discover that the 20th century biolgists and physicists were right after all. Huh uh. Perhaps most curious of all is how thoroughly "mechanical" Mr Benford's picture of the world is. Even culture, to which the mechs finally succumb, is reduced to vague little memes. From clay to the old ones. From carbon to human. From silcon to mechs. And memes to bind them all. And a final peevish point: BEWARE of a book that uses different FONTS to mark the intelligence levels of its characters. It suggests that the author doesn't have enough confidence in the content of his character's statements and relies instead on type weight to give their utterances the necessary importance. Please Mr Benford, do make your higher beings talk in Roman 12 point next time. It really is an awful strain.

Rating:
Summary: The bestGregory Benford Galactic center novel yet.
Review: Sailing Bright Eternity is the final and best novel in Gregory Benford's galactic center saga. The centuries old war between the biological life forms and the mechanical life forms boils to a climax that engenders Benford's themes of hope even through dismal and desperate times. In the end, it is found that higher life forms (the clays) have manipulated these events and have more in store for us. The two sets of main characters, the far future humans genetically engineered to survive and resolve the biological mechanical conflict, and the near future character Nigel Walmsley have had their story lines kept seperate throught the series, with Benford slipping artfully between the two story lines. In this novel, the two story lines merge for the resolution of the series. The technique of switching between the two story lines makes the story more interesting and adds a greater sense of urgency to find out what happens next in each thread. I eagerly look forward to Mr. Benford starting a new series of novels delving into the clay's activities.

Rating:
Summary: ...And then, a miracle happens.
Review: This final novel in the "Galactic Center" set proves that even on a bad day, Benford can still whip out a fairly decent yarn.

Not up to his usual caliber, this novel seems even more disjointed than the previous few, and so much less lovingly spun than the "Ocean of Night" which started the series off. The changes in font are positively annoying, and the character development - or lack thereof - reduces the believability and likability of the people we're supposed to be rooting for. Particularly implausable is the dangerous, tin-man Mantis, whose mysterious and compelling behavior in the earlier novels is reduced to trying to find a "heart". I was sorely disappointed in this outcome, and I won't even discuss what a pitiful, sex-starved moron that Nigel Walmsley has become. It's just too painful.

Despite these and other disappointments, I have to give Benford credit for leaving this capstone open-ended, and providing the glorious, off-beat energy that makes his works so readable. I've never even written a published novel, and Benford has managed to pull together so much in this series, despite the reduction in degrees of freedom that the previous novels require to hold the story together. I can't help being reminded of Arthur C. Clark's "2010" where they somehow managed to change planets from Saturn to Jupiter. Sequels can be tough to pull off. We backed Benford into a corner, (or maybe he did it himself), and he performed well enough to merit a moderate "thumbs-up". I have definitely read worse

Rating:
Summary: Thank God it's over!
Review: This final novel in the "Galactic Center" set proves that even on a bad day, Benford can still whip out a fairly decent yarn.

Not up to his usual caliber, this novel seems even more disjointed than the previous few, and so much less lovingly spun than the "Ocean of Night" which started the series off. The changes in font are positively annoying, and the character development - or lack thereof - reduces the believability and likability of the people we're supposed to be rooting for. Particularly implausable is the dangerous, tin-man Mantis, whose mysterious and compelling behavior in the earlier novels is reduced to trying to find a "heart". I was sorely disappointed in this outcome, and I won't even discuss what a pitiful, sex-starved moron that Nigel Walmsley has become. It's just too painful.

Despite these and other disappointments, I have to give Benford credit for leaving this capstone open-ended, and providing the glorious, off-beat energy that makes his works so readable. I've never even written a published novel, and Benford has managed to pull together so much in this series, despite the reduction in degrees of freedom that the previous novels require to hold the story together. I can't help being reminded of Arthur C. Clark's "2010" where they somehow managed to change planets from Saturn to Jupiter. Sequels can be tough to pull off. We backed Benford into a corner, (or maybe he did it himself), and he performed well enough to merit a moderate "thumbs-up". I have definitely read worse

Rating:
Summary: ...And then, a miracle happens.
Review: This final novel in the "Galactic Center" set proves that even on a bad day, Benford can still whip out a fairly decent yarn.

Not up to his usual caliber, this novel seems even more disjointed than the previous few, and so much less lovingly spun than the "Ocean of Night" which started the series off. The changes in font are positively annoying, and the character development - or lack thereof - reduces the believability and likability of the people we're supposed to be rooting for. Particularly implausable is the dangerous, tin-man Mantis, whose mysterious and compelling behavior in the earlier novels is reduced to trying to find a "heart". I was sorely disappointed in this outcome, and I won't even discuss what a pitiful, sex-starved moron that Nigel Walmsley has become. It's just too painful.

Despite these and other disappointments, I have to give Benford credit for leaving this capstone open-ended, and providing the glorious, off-beat energy that makes his works so readable. I've never even written a published novel, and Benford has managed to pull together so much in this series, despite the reduction in degrees of freedom that the previous novels require to hold the story together. I can't help being reminded of Arthur C. Clark's "2010" where they somehow managed to change planets from Saturn to Jupiter. Sequels can be tough to pull off. We backed Benford into a corner, (or maybe he did it himself), and he performed well enough to merit a moderate "thumbs-up". I have definitely read worse