Rating: 
Summary: Long winded with little pay off...
Review: "I never connected with any of the characters or any of the the ideas.
Rating: 
Summary: "Taut, engaging, even occasionally reassuring . . . ."
Review: "Taut, engaging, even occasionally reassuring, Hendrix's novel leaves readers wishing for another portion of this space-age slice of life."
-- Publisher's Weekly
8/4/97, p. 72.
I was glad to see this review, especially since a second novel, STANDING WAVE -- which takes place in the same universe -- will be appearing from Ace/Berkley in September 1998. LIGHTPATHS, a utopian tale of "your average libertarian-socialist small town in outer space," seems to be finding an audience, and for that I'm grateful. If this thought-experiment gets readers to ponder the delicate balance between individual freedom and social responsibility, then it will have accomplished what I hoped to achieve in writing the book. I look forward to e-mail comments from readers and will respond to the best of my ability.
Rating: 
Summary: HOME is where the heart is...
Review: Against the space station backdrop of HOME (High Orbital Manufacturing Enterprise), several storylines are pursued providing a philosophical commentary on "engineered society" as Utopia, Ecotopia and Dystopia. This is a fine first novel from a writer well known for his short fiction. Social science, theology, bioengineering and artificial intelligence are mixed in varying proportions that are a bit heavy on philosophy, but without detracting from the scientific extrapolations. There is a Gibsonesque techno-shamanistic feel that prevails, and a political correctness of mixed cultures, but an amazing lack of diversities in relationships in this environment of potential social experimentation and advancement.
Rating:
Summary: An engaging postmodern collage...
Review: Alive with technological and intellectual verve, LIGHTPATHS explores the nature of consciousness and the consciousness of nature. The text is dense-packed with thought-provoking dualisms that owe as much to Zen as quantum physics. I particularly enjoyed the exotic and often surreal blend of mysticism and cutting-edge science. The techno-shamanistic aspects of the book were some of the most interesting I've read since William Gibson's COUNT ZERO, though much more cosmological in scale. I couldn't help thinking of the orbital space station, HOME, as one of Plato's ideal Forms, like the perfect bird or vase, which by virtue of being created is inherently flawed. It is precisely this lack of perfection that gives HOME the metaphorical power to explore the human condition. Utopia, we learn, is not an end, but a process. Using speculative ideas, settings, and social milieus as a lens to examine the present world-order is what good science fiction should do, and LIGHTPATHS succeeds admirably
Rating:
Summary: A horrendous disappointment
Review: Don't let the quote about being a cross between Heinlein and Gibson fool you: Lightpaths is tragically nothing like either. To begin with, the book is probably preachier than most religious texts ever written, but with less meat to it. The concept: If we all just try a little bit harder to get eutopia right, we can do it. (That alone should prove it's not anything like Gibson.) But even people who can stomach this ridiculous premise will have trouble with the way that the book is crafted. The plot... isn't there. I read the entire book, and I assure you there is absolutely no plot. There are hints of a plot from time to time, inklings at the end of a chapter that something might be starting to happen, but ultimately these fizzle out and most go either unexplained or else aren't exhumed until the end. The book takes place over about a month, during which huge crisis situations are largely ignored by the characters in the best position to do anything. (Apparently this is okay, because everything sorts itself out in the end without anyone having to do anything except stand around and explain it to the reader. Yay.) The characters are somewhat worse than the plot. Almost every single one is obsessed with the idea of eutopia, above and beyond what could be explained away by the selection process used to determine the Orbital Park's population. Large segments of the book are spent following Marissa's astoundingly tedious researches into eutopia under the guidance of Roger's equally tedious mother, or Jhana's aimless wandering around the station when she's supposed to be doing something--but doesn't. Roger, the only skeptic in the bunch, loses his value as a character when he goes insane (for reasons that were somehow never explained), basically showing that the only sane people are the starry-eyed weirdos who aren't doing anything. There are of course other characters who can deal with the vital systems threatened by the seemingly unimportant crisis, but their effort is spent mostly on preparing for a new concert. Somehow I think that hostile computer code infesting the life-support system and churning out mysterious satellites that provoke military reactions is a little more serious an issue, but then I guess it's okay to put that on hold for three or four days before talking to the right people or checking out the hardware. After all, entertainment is more important than breathing. But there's more to say about the preachiness. The characters--all except Roger--are preachy. The climax of the book is preachy. As the non-plot develops it gets even preachier. And every single character nods along with this like a mob of zombies, with no real sense of fear about the important things going on around them. By the end I couldn't stop rolling my eyes. The moral of the story is: When magic mushrooms are your main character, who needs a plot?
Rating:
Summary: Intrigueing
Review: Good book, very interesting. A little too hedonistic, though. The all-too-happy ending made me want to read something really apocolyptic.
Rating:
Summary: Too boring to finish
Review: I *always* finish a book once I start it... but not this one. I got about a third of the way through it and gave up after realizing that I didn't know or care what I had just read over the last couple of pages. Nothing ever happened, it was just people talking (or reading) about their personal philosophies of life and 'utopia'. Don't bother.
Rating:
Summary: You would be better off to read most anything else
Review: I bought this book because I was in Switzerland and it was in a bargain bin for 1/4 the price of your usual English paperback. I'm not at all sure how I managed to finish it, in that it seemed terrible in every possible way: I found the characters artificial and a lot of their actions and dialogue terribly contrived. For example, what sysadmin would allow an unknown computer to freely interface with her system, which is the main computer controlling all aspects of a space station? At several points the characters seemed to be simply giving speeches of the author's own views. Better novels about utopia and man's interfaction with computers abound.
Rating: 
Summary: Simply Brilliant
Review: I just finished reading the other reviews and I'm wondering how someone could call this work boring?? I'll never understand the criticism too philosophical. Lightpaths is not mind candy for the Startrek novelization crowd. But what vistas open up in its pages! Not only wonderful stories about endearing characters, but fascinating threads on origins, ontology, and the nature of government. I remember reading something by Frank Manuel the Utopian scholar saying the 20th c. couldn't write a utopia--well Mr. Hendrix proves him amply wrong. Be warned its a book made for re-reading and margin notes. Oh yeah, ignore the second half of the New York Review of Science Fiction--critics sheesh!
Rating:
Summary: A hodgepodge of pseudo-science thought
Review: I recently moved and when I did found Lightpath, previously unread, as I was unpacking. Since neither my phone nor my cable were hooked up yet so I started reading this book. I was amazed at how poorly the author manages characterization and kept waiting for the real "meat" of the book. I reached the end without finding out what the book was really about except a paycheck for the writer. The silliness of most of characters emotional and sewual interactions and the Barbie doll descriptions of most of the women -- even the "smart ones" -- makes me wish that this writer was more in touch with the real world and less inclined toward sophomoric philosophy. I understand this guy writes short stories -- and he probably had 4 or 5 good short story ideas in this book. But he should never have made a novel of this length out of those ideas. To recover from Lightpath I re-read Pride of Chanur the nexy day.
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