Rating: 
Summary: BORING
Review: The first 80 pages are boring. The first chapter is cryptic--a feeble attenpt at creating a story hook. I don't know how this book got through an editor. Wait, it didn't. Sometimes its about who you know, not about your abilities as a writer. Makes sense, otherwise this book would never get published.
Rating: 
Summary: Good ideas wasted
Review: There's some good stuff here but it's wasted in a ridiculous plot. One of the differences between the real world, and fiction, is that in the real world, things happen according to the laws of probability. In fiction, it often seems, such laws are completely ignored. Is the imminent destruction of Earth at exactly the instant that people become able to do something about it somehow caused by human actions in space? No, it's just a million-to-one coincidence. How does it happen that one of the primary characters has a relative who has exactly the paranormal powers that are needed to have a chance of preventing the disaster? Just another million-to-one coincidence (maybe billion-to-one?).The author's ideas about how humanity would approach the one chance to prevent the destruction of the Earth---the types of people who would be involved, the level of independent action that they would undertake, the degree of communication that would exist in such a crisis---struck me as ridiculously cynical. I felt the good ideas about alien life were wasted in this story. The method of exposition of the alien perspective also felt redundant and unnecessarily obtuse.
Rating:
Summary: Good ideas wasted
Review: There's some good stuff here but it's wasted in a ridiculous plot. One of the differences between the real world, and fiction, is that in the real world, things happen according to the laws of probability. In fiction, it often seems, such laws are completely ignored. Is the imminent destruction of Earth at exactly the instant that people become able to do something about it somehow caused by human actions in space? No, it's just a million-to-one coincidence. How does it happen that one of the primary characters has a relative who has exactly the paranormal powers that are needed to have a chance of preventing the disaster? Just another million-to-one coincidence (maybe billion-to-one?). The author's ideas about how humanity would approach the one chance to prevent the destruction of the Earth---the types of people who would be involved, the level of independent action that they would undertake, the degree of communication that would exist in such a crisis---struck me as ridiculously cynical. I felt the good ideas about alien life were wasted in this story. The method of exposition of the alien perspective also felt redundant and unnecessarily obtuse.
Rating: 
Summary: Round and round and round...
Review: Wheelers is a collaborative novel by two writers better known for their non-fiction. Ian Stewart is a Professor of Mathematics who writes columns for Scientific American and who has published many popular science books. Jack Cohen is a biologist who has also had a long and eminent career as an academic. He's blotted his copy book a lot though - he is a long time SF fan and has been a popular speaker at many a British SF convention. He has been the power behind the SF throne of many a novel, in that he can't resist providing the hard scientific advice that has raised a lot of SF books head and shoulders above the competition. He devised much of the clever biological speculation that made Harry Harrison's Eden novels so memorable, for instance. Now, with Wheelers these two non-fiction giants have turned their hand to story telling with, it must be admitted, mixed success. It is the twenty third century. The world is recovering from a technology meltdown caused by a generation of "smart" computers that proved to be too smart for their own good. The world is now quite under populated and the Moon and the asteroids are largely the province of a curious Zen Buddhist offshoot cult who make a very rich living mining them. Prudence Odingo is an ex-archaeologist and something of a recluse. Her early career was ruined partly by her own headstrong behaviour and partly by the wheelings and dealings of her post-graduate supervisor. She has spent many of the years since then in space. She returns to Earth from an expedition to Callisto where she has excavated wheeled artefacts that seem to be more than 100,000 years old. In a dramatic courtroom scene, the wheelers come abruptly to life and provide evidence of their extraterrestrial origins by gliding smoothly from the courtroom on anti-gravity beams. It takes the world by storm. But a new crisis arises. A comet from the Oort cloud is heading towards the inner solar system. It seems likely that it will collide with Jupiter. To the consternation of observers on Earth, the four inner moons of Jupiter suddenly change their orbits and their altered gravitational influence diverts the comet. Now it is heading directly for Earth. It seems obvious that some alien intelligence (probably connected with the Wheelers, given that they were discovered on one of Jupiter's moons) is manipulating the comets. Perhaps it is a declaration of war. Prudence and the Zen Buddhists and the academic who once destroyed her career are all charged with making contact with the aliens and attempting to persuade them to modify the Jupiter moon orbits again in order to prevent the comet hitting the Earth. It turns into a nail biting race against time... It's a great plot, with great characters and the tension is admirably maintained right through to the end (will the comet hit the Earth or won't it?). Certainly the book has a lot going for it. Unfortunately the authors inexperience with fiction shows - they fall so much in love with the ideas the novel dramatises that they can't resist the urge to explain in far too much detail and consequently the book fills up with great big wodges of infodumps that slow the story down to nothing flat. However I can't condemn it out of hand - both authors are superb writers of non-fiction; brilliant explainers of often complex ideas and the infodumps are quite fascinating in themselves and beautifully written to boot. They just don't belong in a slam-bang novel like this one.
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