Rating: 
Summary: I should get my money back
Review: One hundred and twenty-four pages was all I could stomach. I'd feel better if I hadn't paid an inflated price in the airport. Sophomoric at best, this exercise in peurile rambling is not worth the paper on which it is printed.
Rating:
Summary: I should get my money back
Review: One hundred and twenty-four pages was all I could stomach. I'd feel better if I hadn't paid an inflated price in the airport. Sophomoric at best, this exercise in peurile rambling is not worth the paper on which it is printed.
Rating:
Summary: A painful read- I finished it in hopes of a good ending.
Review: Sadly I was disapointed even then. This book starts out with painfully undefined terminology that requires 1/3 of the dead trees to be read in order to understand. It was literally a chore to read this book- but I bought it and I would finish it.
3/4 of the story could be a typical survivor movie with the 'DR's happening instead of the 'time outs with a video camera'.
I was afraid I was losing my taste in SciFi when reading this book- but as it turns out it really is just a poor read. Skip it.
Rating:
Summary: More Soap Opera Than Space Opera...
Review: So I made it about two thirds of the way through this novel, and I've had enough. I tried really hard to like this book, and the blurb made it sound reasonably interesting, but very soon into the story I found myself engaged in these writers unfettered, vebose self-indulgance.
Shallow, boring characters who never know when to shut up (and never say anything really interesting... unless you find ugly characters navel-gazing really interesting), and yet another re-tread on the hoary old Ancient Giant Hollow Artifact scenario, which follows the usual and very predictable paradigms.
And you know, if I'm really keen to tittilate myself with some hard-core sex descriptions, I'll go out and purchase a copy of Hustler.
Having spent the last year living and working in L.A. (I'm from the UK), I'm tempted to think that this nonsense was written by two bisexual chemists from Santa Monica (no offence to any bisexual chemists living in Santa Monica).
Avoid this badly written drivel at all costs, and spend your 7 bucks on a Greg Egan novel instead. Truly, truly dreadful.PS: I finally DID throw it across the room.
Rating:
Summary: A stinking souffle of sci-fi's worst.
Review: Staggeringly, unmitigably awful.
Traditional science fiction used to present the notion that humanity would carefully select only its very best for that initial encounter with an alien civilization. Recent stories have left the selection up to chance, (Arthur C. Clarke's "Rama" sequels actually postulated a sampling of people dominated by criminals.) but "Iris" leaves first contact up to the most pathetic assortment of head cases, psychos, deviants, perverts, sadists, masochists, schizophrenics, co-dependents, and just plain neurotics that Earth (and the Moon!) could rustle up!
This shipload of losers rockets off into space, seeking to...
find themselves...
or find out who they are...
or gather their feelings...
or learn how to relate...
or heal...
or grieve...
or get in touch with their inner beingness and personism...
or some such nonsense!
No kidding. Every plot twist comes in a blizzard of "issues," and is followed by a period when the characters decide "to move on!"
Here they are, orbiting a hostile rogue planet on the outskirts of the solar system, and en masse they plunge into a computerized virtual reality world to escape from, well, real reality!
The very first few disgusting lines of the very first page of the first chapter are a valuable flag for the unmitigable avalanche of literary sewage to come.
One woman actually freezes to death because her shipmates are too busy with life and death survival concerns to rescue her, as she expects them to, from her own narcissistic stunt out on the subzero surface of an airless asteroid.
Whew! Fortunately, the only aliens they all find are a long dormant shipload of resentful biomechanoids, rebellious robots and ambiguously unfriendly computer programs.
With ambassadors like this to the cosmos, the human race would be lucky not to get blown to oblivion just so the universe could be rid of our whining!
Be sure to miss this one!
Rating:
Summary: Very poor editing, easy to put down.
Review: The story was barely good enough for me to want to even know how it came out. There was a lot of superfluous stuff that I just plain skipped over. The authors tried I guess to make the characters interesting but most were so offensive to me that I didn't even want to know about them. That was too bad because most of the story seemed to be about all the little personal foibles and problems that the group of oddball characters had rather than science fiction. The other problem I had with the novel was that the techno-babble was not at all believable. But somehow I got through the novel and am now able to move on to something much better. I certainly will not be reading anything by those two authors again. I think the editor deserves a good part of the negative criticism I have for this novel. The novel should be much shorter. I don't recommend this novel.
Rating: 
Summary: This is EXCELLENT hard science fiction! Epic and complex.
Review: This huge novel goes right onto my top ten list. It is full of tons of richly developed ideas, including an awesome alien life form as well as a fascinating means of human-alien interface. Bold inventiveness on everything from cyberspace to immortality to future societies take a cast of truly unique characters on a fascinating and powerful journey.
Rating:
Summary: Iris Is A Hideous Mess
Review: This is arguably the worst science fiction novel I've ever read. The characters are so wholly unsympathetic and cold that I found the few redeeming qualities of the hard science disappeared. I wanted the book to end within the first few pages. Run. Run fast and far.
Rating:
Summary: THIS IS A GREAT BOOK!
Review: This was the second Barton & Capobianco book I've read, and it is also definately the last. The first I read was "Alpha Centauri," and it seemd to have so much promise. I was disappointed with that book, mainly because of the emotionally dysfunctional, sex-obsessed, totally unappealing characters. I found myself wondering if everyone in the future has a severe personality disorder, and if so, how does the human race manage to survive? I'm afriad "Iris" had all the same problems. I wonder what point the authors are trying to make by making every single character so ugly and impossible to relate to. The characters continually think and do ugly, petty, twisted things, and the results are ugly and pointless. If their *are* emotionally healthy people in the future, why do the authors ignore these people? Before writing another book, mabye the authors should work out their issues in therapy first, rather than drawing unsuspecting readers into their ugly world. In addition, long, long sections of "Iris" are the detailed descriptions of the character's memories of miscellaneous unimportant events. It would have been bearable if there had been a point to it all. In the end, I felt like this book had virtually no plot at all, and I was glad when it was over. Maybe this is supposed to be sophisticated SF for the modern, savvy, cynical reader. For me, it just isn't working.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointed Again
Review: This was the second Barton & Capobianco book I've read, and it is also definately the last. The first I read was "Alpha Centauri," and it seemd to have so much promise. I was disappointed with that book, mainly because of the emotionally dysfunctional, sex-obsessed, totally unappealing characters. I found myself wondering if everyone in the future has a severe personality disorder, and if so, how does the human race manage to survive? I'm afriad "Iris" had all the same problems. I wonder what point the authors are trying to make by making every single character so ugly and impossible to relate to. The characters continually think and do ugly, petty, twisted things, and the results are ugly and pointless. If their *are* emotionally healthy people in the future, why do the authors ignore these people? Before writing another book, mabye the authors should work out their issues in therapy first, rather than drawing unsuspecting readers into their ugly world. In addition, long, long sections of "Iris" are the detailed descriptions of the character's memories of miscellaneous unimportant events. It would have been bearable if there had been a point to it all. In the end, I felt like this book had virtually no plot at all, and I was glad when it was over. Maybe this is supposed to be sophisticated SF for the modern, savvy, cynical reader. For me, it just isn't working.
| 
