Rating: 
Summary: Pohl could learn a thing from Stephen Baxter
Review: Typical of Pohl's depressing SF, where the world is horrible and uncaring and the hero's neurotic and annoying. Pohl is so unsympathetic to the Omerga Point theory of John Barrow and Frank Tipler, it makes you wonder why he bothered to spend the time writing a trilogy about it. Pohl could take a lesson from Stephen Baxter, who uses Barrow and Tipler's ideas about escatological cosmology to great effect in his own novels.
Rating: 
Summary: Vintage Pohl - wry, dark, beautifully-written
Review: ________________________________________There's something strange going on at the derelict "Starlab"space
station - aka the "Starcophagus" - and Dr. Patrice Adcock is going up to
find out what's happening. Her party is kidnapped by reps of the
"Beloved Leaders" and fired off as tachyon images to a distant starbase.
It seems the Beloved are fighting a war with the Horch and want to
enlist humanity on their side. The plot thickens when the Horch smuggle in disturbing images of
whole worlds destroyed by Beloved forces - dismissed by the Beloved
with "we merely transported them to their immortality at the
eschaton." The Beloved run off a couple more copies of Dr. Pat for "breeding
purposes". She finds she rather likes being a triplet... but the extra copy
situation turns darker, with unsettling echoes of earlier uses of this old
and disturbing SF idea. This is vintage Pohl - wry, dark, beautifully-written. I've seen some
unflattering reviews of this book, but this is first-rate
work,
not to be missed if you're a Fred Pohl fan - and who isn't? Happy reading!
Pete Tillman
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