Mother of Storms

Rating:
Summary: Mainstream SF
Review: Looking at reviews of other John Barnes books, it seems as though reviewers can't write three sentences without invoking Robert Heinlein's name, as in "Barnes continues in the vein of..." or "Writing in the spirit of...". Interestingly for this novel, Barnes has cast aside his +5 Mantle of Robert Heinlein and is instead channeling Greg Bear.

Just as in most of Greg Bear's books (such as "Blood Music", "Slant" and "Darwin's Radio") Barnes' tale presents us with a bevy of characters confronted with a looming crisis who are affected by it in different personal ways. Story threads featuring the President, a nervy reporter, the Astronaut, a college student and a Porn Star are thrown at the reader. ("Slant" had most of these, including the Porn Star.)

Often, these story threads intersect. Will the college student meet the Porn Star? Will the Porn Star meet the President? Are the President and the Astronaut star-crossed lovers? (Yes, Yes, and thankfully, No.)

Barnes' strength appears to be in building interesting, internally consistent and plausible worlds. The "device" for this book is XV. XV is like TV, but for your brain. Just plug in and feel what others are feeling. Apparently, this is a wonderful way to sustain a world-wide riot.

For the hard-SF crowd, the book picks up in the middle with computer-brain interfaces leading to Metaphysical Problems of the Self. But I think that this pushes the final portion of the book into metaphysical gobbledygook, making the ending a bit of an anticlimax.

The brisk pacing of the book makes it hard to put down, which makes for good beach reading. I only wish that the ending had more punch.

Rating:
Summary: Mainstream SF
Review: Looking at reviews of other John Barnes books, it seems as though reviewers can't write three sentences without invoking Robert Heinlein's name, as in "Barnes continues in the vein of..." or "Writing in the spirit of...". Interestingly for this novel, Barnes has cast aside his +5 Mantle of Robert Heinlein and is instead channeling Greg Bear.

Just as in most of Greg Bear's books (such as "Blood Music", "Slant" and "Darwin's Radio") Barnes' tale presents us with a bevy of characters confronted with a looming crisis who are affected by it in different personal ways. Story threads featuring the President, a nervy reporter, the Astronaut, a college student and a Porn Star are thrown at the reader. ("Slant" had most of these, including the Porn Star.)

Often, these story threads intersect. Will the college student meet the Porn Star? Will the Porn Star meet the President? Are the President and the Astronaut star-crossed lovers? (Yes, Yes, and thankfully, No.)

Barnes' strength appears to be in building interesting, internally consistent and plausible worlds. The "device" for this book is XV. XV is like TV, but for your brain. Just plug in and feel what others are feeling. Apparently, this is a wonderful way to sustain a world-wide riot.

For the hard-SF crowd, the book picks up in the middle with computer-brain interfaces leading to Metaphysical Problems of the Self. But I think that this pushes the final portion of the book into metaphysical gobbledygook, making the ending a bit of an anticlimax.

The brisk pacing of the book makes it hard to put down, which makes for good beach reading. I only wish that the ending had more punch.

Rating:
Summary: On the edge, but a terrific hard-science SF read
Review: On the surface Mother of Storms is a tale of climatological disaster writ large. What I found more fascinating and engaging though were the incredible evolutions in technology Barnes proposes, and the geopolitical changes occuring up to and throughout the story. Barnes draws very plausible and I think subtle rationale to each of the political and technological changes in Storms. I will spare the reader here the details, as I don't want to deprive you of the excitement of discovering each nugget. However, Barnes outperforms his peers at extrapolating from the world of today and creating a surprisingly believable world of tomorow. I highly recommend Mother of Storms.

Rating:
Summary: Father of Posthumanity
Review: On the surface, "Mother of Storms" is basically a book about a global ecological disaster, a calamity novel along the lines of "Lucifer's Hammer" or "The Forge of God", in which numerous storylines are followed simultaneously as the world goes to hell. Barnes pulls this off quite well with a solid grounding in science and with characters that are interesting and believable. But what makes the book special is the way he describes the first mating of human and computer intelligence. His may be the best depiction ever written of a positive feedback loop taking effect and the result being a runaway superintelligence. It's stirring.

Rating:
Summary: Worth reading, but not great
Review: The novel Mother of Storms has some ok plotting, some ok sex scenes, and plenty of fascinating information about meteorology. Nothing stands out to make this a good novel, but for some reason I kept turning the pages to find out what happened at the end.

The story begins when a missile attack in Siberia leads to rapid global warming and gigantic hurricanes spring up all around the world. For most of the book, the plot follows the conventions of disaster epics. We're introduced to a huge cast of characters, including the President of the US, a porn star, a reporter, a businessman, and several scientists. The characters run into each other on various occasions throughout the novel. There's a lot of talking about impending disaster, a lot of sex (sometimes both at the same time), a lot of political diatribes, and a lot of action scenes, most of which are fairly well written. The novel is packed fairly densely with plot, so some of the plot lines don't get developed as much as they should. Others, such as a ridiculous story about a man trying to avenge his daughter's death, should have been left out entirely. While there's nothing to make this novel special or memorable, it does keep you reading till the end, just to see how Barnes will wrap up all of his diverging plot lines.

Rating:
Summary: Worth reading, but not great
Review: The novel Mother of Storms has some ok plotting, some ok sex scenes, and plenty of fascinating information about meteorology. Nothing stands out to make this a good novel, but for some reason I kept turning the pages to find out what happened at the end.

The story begins when a missile attack in Siberia leads to rapid global warming and gigantic hurricanes spring up all around the world. For most of the book, the plot follows the conventions of disaster epics. We're introduced to a huge cast of characters, including the President of the US, a porn star, a reporter, a businessman, and several scientists. The characters run into each other on various occasions throughout the novel. There's a lot of talking about impending disaster, a lot of sex (sometimes both at the same time), a lot of political diatribes, and a lot of action scenes, most of which are fairly well written. The novel is packed fairly densely with plot, so some of the plot lines don't get developed as much as they should. Others, such as a ridiculous story about a man trying to avenge his daughter's death, should have been left out entirely. While there's nothing to make this novel special or memorable, it does keep you reading till the end, just to see how Barnes will wrap up all of his diverging plot lines.

Rating:
Summary: Starts off exciting and slowly peters out.
Review: This book begins with an exciting and plausible premise of tremendous storms hurling across the world. Unfortunately, the author departs from the storms to bring in dozens of semi-relevant characters, lots of politics, ridiculous sex, and turns the book into a mess. While the storm scenes were written well, by the end of the book I didn't care who lived or died or evolved or how the crisis would be resolved. This book has a lot less to do with storms than a mishmash of the author's ideas that might be better explored separately in a number of books.

Rating:
Summary: poorly organized and written
Review: This book is one of the worst I have ever started to read ("started" because I couldn't finish it). At first glance, the plot sounds interesting; but upon actually reading the text, it is lost in a miasma of cardboard characters and uninteresting subplots. The author goes on at great length about a wholly unbelievable technology (which allows one person to experience another's experiences), much to the detriment of the story. On top of this poor organization, the writing itself is amateurish -- not at all helped by being entirely in present tense, as if the author is hoping to distract the reader from the weak plot and characters. There have been very few books which I've started and been unwilling to finish, but this is one of them.

Rating:
Summary: Silly science, not plausible
Review: This book starts out as a good complex science fiction thriller, set in the very near future, but as it goes along the science becomes sillier and sillier, to the point that it is no longer possible to "suspend disbelief" and stay interested in the science. Which forces you to fall back on the characterizations which are, as is usual for sci-fi and pop stuff, pretty flat. I tossed the book without finishing it. Two stars because the author did have some good story ideas going in, and a couple of the storm scenes were quite gripping.

Rating:
Summary: Get real, you illiterates!
Review: This book was compelling enough that I am writing this review several years after having read it as I go order a copy for a sailor friend. Does it win top literary awards in any category? No. Will it walk away with the Booker prize? Hardly. Is it a FABULOUS read while on vacation or when wanting a brief respite from the grind. You bet! I think I'll read it again. And if you haven't, so should you.