Borrowed Tides

Rating:
Summary: Not even a very interesting failure
Review: -----------------------------------------------------------
I picked this one up from the library for some reason, renewed it a couple of times, and finally read it last night. I finished it, but just barely.

BT opens pretty well, with an oddball first expedition to Alpha Centauri based partly on an Iroquois legend. The sfnal premises are laughably wrong-headed -- the stuff of bad TV shows -- but I kept reading, thinking Levinson had something else in mind. Perhaps he did, but the story kept twisting and turning -- odd enough to keep me reading, but not coherent enough to gel. About the only real virtue in BT is that it is short.

Some readers did like it -- the Amazon reviews are split between the 4-5 stars and the 1-2's...

This book clearly wasn't aimed at me. It's not even a very interesting failure. I won't be eager to read another Levinson novel. Caveat lector.

Next time I'll try to remember to check the reviews first. It's not like I don't have other stuff to read...

Feh.

Rating:
Summary: a different kind of space voyage
Review: I found Borrowed Tides -- Paul Levinson's second science fiction novel -- very engaging and thought-provoking. It raises far more questions than it answers, but that's very satisfying too, in the end, leaving a warm-buzz itch in your mind. The pace is different from other space voyage novels that I've read. Parts of it happen in a flash; parts focus on mind-warping problems and paradoxes at great length. The truth is that we do not really know what travel to another star is like. Borrowed Tides suggests that it may be very different from what we expect. I suppose this won't be everyone's cup of tea. But it's definitely mine.

Rating:
Summary: Pretty silly
Review: Most science fiction deals with new technologies
and scientific findings, or with their social
impact. Borrowed Tides is something else -- a
novel about the nature of the universe, but
in philosophic, even spiritual terms. The
characters, who are engaging as people -- sometimes
lovable, sometimes infuriating -- grapple with immense
problems, at the limits of their, and our, understanding.
They grapple with them nobly and rationally, and thus
they win our affection. The characters cannot succeed
completely -- who can, against the odds of the universe --
but the novel does, admirably. Borrowed Tides is very
different from Levinson's first novel, The Silk Code,
which I also enjoyed. I highly recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: SF written by an eight year old?
Review: OK OK I confess, I only to got to page 80, and I also have to admit, hard science in SF novels is not that important to me, nor are the mechanics of interstellar spaceflight. But to make the mechanics of space flight, apparently using contemporary science, the main interest of the first 30% of your novel and then be so ludicrously ill informed about it really is an acute embarassment. Its reminiscent of someone who was a techical advisor to star wars. Characterisation and plot development were also weak areas, in fact the novel had no strengths, unless you count the fact the author seemed in a cheerful mood throughout and quite unaware of his own shortcomings. Avoid.

Rating:
Summary: Reminiscent of Haldeman's Forever War.
Review: Ok, my background (recently) is CJ Cherryh and Iain M Banks. Both very hard-sf type people, with exceptionally deep characters and far flung plots that are complex on a macro and micro level.

This is not that kind of book. The story is told in the same sort of way that Joe Haldemann wrote _The Forever War_. The story is intriguing, but the author is trying to tell it in far too little space. At only 258 pages, it is a very short read. However, the 258 pages encompass 16 years of time. There are jumps in the book that literally gloss over 3-4 years at a time.

The people in the book are not very fully developed. In fact, they are developed to a level I'd expect from Dean Koontz or some other pulp author. There really is only one main character, and you couldn't really call him a protagonist. The story meanders on, holding up this character as some moral lighthouse, some metaphor for humanities need to "explore the stars," as it were.

It is a very cheery novel, with the darkest parts of the book passing in what could be just a flicker of dark compared to what you'd see in Banks' _Against a Dark Background_, or even Cherryh's _Downbelow Station_.

I guess where I'm going with this is the book is as shallow as the characters. It tells a fun, Buck Rogers kind of story, and I'll admit I got attached to it the same way I might get attached to a channel on TV I mistakenly flipped to (and felt compelled to finish the show).

Not an excellent book. A fun (and thankfully short) read. Good plane or car material.

Ah, one final note. The subtle little pokes at society (such as mentioning "Lawrence Livermore/Microsoft Labs" in the beginning of the book) really ruffled my feathers. They come out of nowhere, they're not justified, and they just serve to irritate the reader.

Buy used.

Rating:
Summary: SF written by an eight year old?
Review: The only reason I finished this book was because I was confined in a car for sixteen hours with nothing else to read. It's a bunch of doo-doo. If you feel compelled to read it, at least check it out from the library rather than wasting seven bucks.

Rating:
Summary: Caught in the interstellar undertow
Review: This is the second book I've read by Paul Levinson. I picked it up on the strength of his first novel, "The Silk Code," That book, despite its flaws, was enjoyable because of the intellectual quirkiness of its plot. "Borrowed Tides" is equally quirky. It combines quantum mechanics, space navigation, the nature of time, and Native American mysticism in a story about the first manned interstellar trip to Alpha Centauri. Although I can't comment on the plausibility of the ideas, they do make an interesting mix.

Unfortunately, I didn't find "Borrowed Tides" as successful as "The Silk Code." Like its predecessor, it was disjointed in spots and weak in terms of character development. Those faults were acceptable in "The Silk Code" (to me at least) because of the large time span encompassed by the story and the sheer audacity of Levinson's ideas. However, even though ideas were likewise at the core of "Borrowed Tides," the focus of the story on a small group of people confined together for 16 years on a single ship demanded more attention to character development. There were too many examples of things happening without sufficient motivation, and several characters were only mentioned in passing until they were needed to move the plot forward at the end.

Despite these faults, "Borrowed Tides" was not without its pleasures. The middle sections of the book dragged, but the beginning was good and the end was moving. This is by no means great science fiction, but its faults are offset by its speculative nature. 3 1/2 stars


Rating:
Summary: This book is well written, but a terrible story
Review: This well-written story pulls you in with its characterizations and a general atmosphere of "the unknown". It reminds me of the sf writers of the late 60's/early 70's that focused more on the psychology, sociology, philosophy of their characters - i.e. Silverberg, Sturgeon, Ellison. You don't read alot of sf like that today. Read it without any expectations of what a sf novel should be, and you won't be disappointed.