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Himmelsjäger: Roman (2013)

by Gregory Benford(Favorite Author)

3.2 of 5 Votes: 4

languge

English

genre

Fantasy

publisher

Heyne Verlag

series

Bowl of Heaven

review 1: What happens when two masters of Science Fiction collaborate on an entirely new novel of mankind’s future among the stars?You get something so bad that it’s worth sitting up and paying attention.Honestly, this book is definitively, and I’m being serious here, the most poorly crafted professionally produced novel I’ve ever seen. I dare you to find its equal. But let me back up a bit. See, I’ve spent the past month or more riding high on a flurry of Science Fiction novels, television, and movies. I thought the joyride of greatness was never going to end. I picked up this nugget of SF from the used bookstore for a few dollars and thought it was just another sign from the SF gods that my destiny was to never have to experience the real world, ever again. I could just... more keep losing myself in tale after tale of space travel and aliens.But with this work, all that came to a screeching halt. Too bad, there was something interesting happening in those pages. But whatever it was got buried by a ton of shit.Larry Niven will always be a hero of mine for his Ringworld books, and Benford for his Ocean of Night novels. In this collaboration we’ve got the classic BDO (one of my favorite subjects in SF – the Big Dumb Object), a solar system sized artifact shaped like a bowl that is tethered to star that has been traveling through the interstellar medium since long before humans existed in anything like their modern form. Our intrepid heroes from earth get trapped on this giant bowl and have to uncover its many mysteries… before they starve, or are hunted by the things living there. Again, lots to love from that premise, at least from my perspective. So why do I feel so much hate for it? Well, one has to be my expectations. I assumed this was going to be very good. Instead, I got something like a pilot for television show, we’re only getting the premise. No resolution on any single plot point raised. Period. It’s just like they were busily typing away and decided it was long enough and so they stopped. Book over. Second, guys, seriously, I love Tor books, and I’ve already mentioned my love for the authors. But this thing is clearly a working draft that accidently got sent to the printers. How bad was it? Well, so bad that after 50 pages or so I got out a piece of paper and stuffed it inside the book, whenever I would come across something inexplicable, I’d write a quick note. There is no way I could remember all that stuff that started going goofy. Seriously, this stuff is beyond unforgivable. When Cliff comes out of his hyper sleep he quickly realizes they’ve been asleep for about 80 years (pg 26)… during that time they’ve traveled 40 light years (pg 28). Now, I’ll start off right there mentioning that ramscoop drives in SF have been around for a while, and the physics of how they’d work are pretty well understood (even if the engineering isn’t). They won’t go half the speed of light, that’s off by a couple of orders of magnitude. But whatever, this is supposed to be a hard-science fiction novel, so that sort of stuff is annoying, but I can live with it. But then it gets mentioned that they’ve been traveling .0081 the speed of light (pg 36). Oh, well, that fixes one problem and creates another. They would have traveled a bit over 3 light years since they’ve been away from earth, not 40.Again, who really cares, right? Except, it’s just that stuff like that bugs me. How about the fact that it’s mentioned casually that they lost contact with earth over a century ago (pg263)? Wait… what? They’ve only been traveling for 80 years, remember? No, they’ve been traveling for ‘centuries’ (pg 348).But wait! Turns out, they’ve been getting regular updates from earth the whole time (pg 409). So nevermind that last thing. At least they’re safe there in orbit of that Orange dwarf star where the bowl is ((almost the size of the sun) pg 39), except that it becomes a red dwarf for the rest of the book (for those not into astronomical trivia, a red dwarf is just a tad larger than Jupiter, and the bowl would have to be considerably smaller to be in the temperate zone around the star. None of the numbers they would have given would make any sense then).Okay, so I’m sure that if sounds like I’m being an ass, I mean, so these guys writing a ‘hard’ science fiction novel suck at math (well, arithmetic)… and pull numbers out their asses and don’t bother to keep them consistent. A story isn’t about math, it’s about, characters, prose, plot… not numbers. Fine, does it bug you that Howard gets injured, patched up, then re-patched up a few paragraphs later? And I don’t mean they checked back with him, I mean they pulled the same bit of debris from his arm more than once… they bandaged the same wound (after removing said debris) twice (pg 106).Or, Cliff, our story’s protagonist, inexplicably is called Carl (pg 327) before going back to being Cliff again.Or, Abye states, dramatically, that they’re being hunted by aliens (pg 378), then, on the VERY NEXT PAGE (pg 379) when a traveling companion says they’re being hunted by aliens Abye reacts by saying ‘they’re after us?’ His eyes ‘go wide’ and everything. I mean, the dialog makes zero sense. Speaking of actual words… at one point a group finds a tool left behind by some alien and the narrator asks, rhetorically, ‘Dared they try it.’What the f**k does that mean? Later, after witnessing the slaughter of a group of aliens by a third alien group, a character states, rather poignantly, ‘They lost a lot of dead.’Um, seriously, what the hell is that supposed to even mean? And I’ve not even got into problems I had with Cliff, our sociopathic lead character who, minutes after his life’s true love gets kidnapped by an alien, decides to start screwing the only girl he can find. He never even hints at feeling shitty about it. Just idly thinks that things could get complicated later. And of course the plot itself seems to revolve around getting the characters onto the bowl. Once there, they all sort of wondered around, no plan of action, just kind of vaguely trying to not get caught by the aliens… and sampling every damned piece of matter they come across to see if they can eat it. – Hey, it’s bird, think we can eat it? Look, a tree, think we can eat it? Whoa, dirt, think we can eat it? Dude, it’s alien shit, think we can eat it?At some point, if I’m being honest with you, I started enjoying this. The same way I enjoy watching MST3K. It’s such an epic disaster than I started to revel in it. I realized I’m reading something that was pounded out over a weekend, probably while the authors were drinking. They clearly think I’m a moron, that I’m stupid, that readers in general are, and decided to vomit out some words and call it finished. Screw us. We just need to shut up and hand over money I guess. I’m giving this two stars instead of one because of the balls it took them to write such shit and still have the nerve to put this out for public consumption. Also, I did like the cover, and the interior had a few illustrations. So, yay for that.
review 2: This is a tricky book to rate. There are plenty of good things and plenty of bad things about. As a Jungian, I thought the bird folk minds were interesting, but I don't think they did a good job explaining why the bird folk are so violent and cruel. The bowl seems too ringworldy, and the plot needed better editing and more time. The book ends with 4 different plot threads and none of them are resolved at the end. The final one just leds to the title of the next book in the series. I, for one, won't be reading it. 2.5 stars less

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