The Black Sun

Rating:
Summary: Exciting without depth
Review: "Black Sun" is an easily read, entertaining story of the exploreres of tomorrow. The book is never-the-less nothing more than a story. It completely lacks the depth that so many good SciFi books are known to have. The plot is not very original. If you have read books like Robert Silverberg's "Starborne", Gregory Benford's "Against Infinity" and Robert Heinlein's "Farmer in the Sky", you'll find yourself on home ground. Williamson is a bit to eager to dazzle with his Mexican language skills, this is somewhat annoying but not a big problem. Some "science" issues are a bit far fetched, but if the book is regarded as simply a story, this doesn't matter.

Rating:
Summary: Exciting without depth
Review: "Black Sun" is an easily read, entertaining story of the exploreres of tomorrow. The book is never-the-less nothing more than a story. It completely lacks the depth that so many good SciFi books are known to have. The plot is not very original. If you have read books like Robert Silverberg's "Starborne", Gregory Benford's "Against Infinity" and Robert Heinlein's "Farmer in the Sky", you'll find yourself on home ground. Williamson is a bit to eager to dazzle with his Mexican language skills, this is somewhat annoying but not a big problem. Some "science" issues are a bit far fetched, but if the book is regarded as simply a story, this doesn't matter.

Rating:
Summary: Exciting without depth
Review: "Black Sun" is an easily read, entertaining story of the exploreres of tomorrow. The book is never-the-less nothing more than a story. It completely lacks the depth that so many good SciFi books are known to have. The plot is not very original. If you have read books like Robert Silverberg's "Starborne", Gregory Benford's "Against Infinity" and Robert Heinlein's "Farmer in the Sky", you'll find yourself on home ground. Williamson is a bit to eager to dazzle with his Mexican language skills, this is somewhat annoying but not a big problem. Some "science" issues are a bit far fetched, but if the book is regarded as simply a story, this doesn't matter.

Rating:
Summary: A pleasant juvenile adventure
Review: Although The Black Sun is not labelled as a juvenile adventure, it seems best suited for adolescents of all ages (like me!). A drunken star captain and his conniving cohort face outer-space monsters and probably (although I'm not through yet) get saved by the brave young people on board the colony ship.

Rating:
Summary: Slow paced expedition
Review: As the translator of the hungarian edition of this book I read it twice. Well, certainly will not be my favorite. Not being a native I cannot know why Williamson's characters can only 'shrug' or 'shake their heads' for a million times, as if other english phrases did not exist. Moreover, one third of the book deals with the everyday life in the spider, whene did the characters eat, when slept, when did they climbed the steps to the bubble. Simple boring after a hundred pages. The last page lacks the usual 'to be continued' insert often seen in movies, since the story ends rather abruptly. On the pro side, I was fascinated by the complexity of the amphibian history, which gives some depth to the novel. To me the best part was Kip's dream as the Watcher, that chapter was simple unbeatable.

Rating:
Summary: Slow paced expedition
Review: Had I been alive (and reading science fiction) in 1930's and 40's, reading this book would have been like meeting an old friend. However, for a Benford/Niven fan like myself, it is just awful. The main premise is implausible, the technology, both human and alien, does not even pretend to follow any kind of physics, and the plot is utterly predictable. Moreover, while 1940's SF characters lacked any personality - the intended audience, male teenagers, did not need it, - all "The Black Sun" characters have ridiculously exaggerated personality traits, as if the author used to the original model were trying to overcompensate. Not worth buying.

Rating:
Summary: Flashback to when only teenagers read SF
Review: Had I been alive (and reading science fiction) in 1930's and 40's, reading this book would have been like meeting an old friend. However, for a Benford/Niven fan like myself, it is just awful. The main premise is implausible, the technology, both human and alien, does not even pretend to follow any kind of physics, and the plot is utterly predictable. Moreover, while 1940's SF characters lacked any personality - the intended audience, male teenagers, did not need it, - all "The Black Sun" characters have ridiculously exaggerated personality traits, as if the author used to the original model were trying to overcompensate. Not worth buying.

Rating:
Summary: Almost a great book. A very good novel.
Review: I agree with the read who said the book was exciting but lacked depth. The story line was great, but slow. The end of the book seemed like it should be the beginning of a sequel. And I think I'd have rather read the sequel.

Rating:
Summary: Black Sun is entertaining, if highly improbable, Space Opera
Review: I bought The Black Sun because I wondered what Jack Williamson would be producing after 70 years as a science fiction writer. What I found was a story that, aside from a few words and phrases, would have been successful in the 1930s. (Indeed it could have been WRITTEN in the 1930's, put aside, and updated for publication in 1997.) Although the jacket blurb characterizes the book as of the "hard science" school of science fiction, that is silly. Williamson concocts a (typical for the genre) gimmick, using the phrase "quantum wave," to get the odd assemblage of unlikely and basically cardboard cutout characters to a distant world, and then sets the characters loose to interact in an alien setting -- interact with each other, with the setting, and with ... well, I will leave that for the reader to discover.Despite those implicit reservations, this is an entertaining book of its type. If you like space opera and do not mind the numerous unlikelihoods that go with it, and especially if you like the sort of thing that Williamson and his colleagues were writing in the 1930s and 1940s, you will probably enjoy this book. The characters (or perhaps the author) have an unseemly obsession with food, dining at astonishingly frequent intervals on quantities of food that one can scarcely imagine having been fitted into their craft, but despite that, the book is a nice diversion and a pleasant trip back to The Science Fiction of Yore. My rating of 8 reflects the pleasure that I derived from the comfortable sense of old-time SF (I LOVED that stuff when I was a kid), the capable movement of the story toward an intriguing conclusion, and the general readability of Williamson's prose. Those who are not serious fans of the genre might want to wait for the paperback edition.

Rating:
Summary: Unbelievable premise followed by a pretty boring story
Review: I found this book in my closet when I didn't have anything else to read at the moment. I should have left it there. It looks like an interesting story of interstellar colonization and adventure on a new world. However, it fails pretty miserably for several reasons.

First, the idea that people are going to sign up in droves to get on these seed ships that "may" take them somewhere if they're very lucky just wasn't at all believable. Then, if you try to look past that, the author makes it impossible by making the characters seem as if they didn't know what they were getting into. Then, once they got there, the story focuses on silly conflicts between the colonists and a vague alien presence on the world that is never explained very well. This story just never went anywhere. The most interesting part was a dream about the aliens that gave us the most background about them, but it wasn't enough. There was not enough attention paid to details, or enough tension in the plot to make the story at all worthwhile. The characters also weren't anyone you could get very interested in. They were poorly developed and their interactions didn't seem at all realistic.

I wouldn't recommend this book, and unless I see something that looks really good, I'll probably avoid anything by Williamson in the future.