Kent archie
Interesting world building, space battles (that are described as if they were on the ocean)
and several surprises.
It ends like its the first book in a series but I can't find any indication there are/will be more.
I was confused by one group of characters, the students.
Are the students what I think of as students, people in school to learn things, like geology, Victorian era romance novels, etc?If so, why would they decide to overthrow the cadets? None of the students would know how to run a spaceship.Or did they all attend space academy and the ones who flunked out are now called students?
First off, the author is a friend of mine.
The main characters are genetically modified humans who can move very fast.
Not as fast as the Flash, but much quicker than normal.
I pictured Usain Bolt but several times as fast.
And having the metabolism of a hummingbird or a shrew.
The downside is that their minds run really fast as well.
They can't concentrate on anything for more than a few seconds.
This makes it nearly impossible to hold a job.
Even talking to normal people is nearly impossible.
And they have to eat all the time.
The writing gets this across by using many short sentences and frequent changes in the characters focus.
Someone will open a door, go through it and close the door.
In that short time, the characters will have run around the room a few times, eaten something
and thought about 4-5 things, only one of which was important to solving the problem.
There were times while reading this that I felt the need to get up and move around.
The writing style changes to reflect the changing mental state of the characters.
I found this to be effective and clever.
Overall, it's an interesting story, cleverly told.
There were perhaps too many scenes reminding us that the characters were
easily distracted and had to eat a lot.
I enjoyed it and recommend it.
After I finished the book, it seemed to me that the mystery being solved was pretty simple.But it was really hard for the characters because they couldn't think about or even remember stuff for more than a few seconds.This is another way the author gets across what it would feel like to be these people.
In a disaster story like this, I am looking for the plot, how the disaster came about, what, if anything could be done to prevent or fix it and so on.
While there is a bunch of this in the book, it was mostly about the characters, what they felt, how they reacted.
I was more interested in the parts about trying to protect the earth than I was in the symptoms of severe sleep deprivation and hunger
The collapse of civilization caused by the panic would result in billions starving to death or being killed by other people.It seems to me that if the comet had hit, it wouldn't have caused more damage to human life than the panic that was caused by its arrival.After the comet is handled, the situation for survivors is described as a second Dark Ages.But it's actually much worse.Most people don't know how to grow or hunt for food, make tools etc.It would be more like a second stone age.
It was an OK book, but I don't think I was the target audience.
This was described as Lost set in an apartment building and I think that is apt.
Every few pages some new weird thing would happen.
Our hero notices some odd things about the layout of the apartments and eventually gets to saving the world.
I read “The Fold” first and then this instead of the other way.
I think you can start with either book and get the same number of surprises.
I enjoyed this a lot and will be reading more stuff by this author.
For my tastes, there was way too much time spent on the characters.
The book was written in the mid 1970s, much of it takes place in 2020 +- 20 years.
The science fictional elements were interesting, automated highways, colonies on the moon, colony ships and the beginnings of Star Trek replicators.
But you could have made the 5 main characters quintuplets, not clones and the story would have been the same.
I did like the writing style so I will try some of her other books.
This was not the book I thought it was.
Long ago I read a book about a group of people were traveling in space and for some reason they are able to solve very complex problems.
In particular, they developed a way to send a lot of text by converting it to a single very large number.
This book involves a group of people traveling through space at very high velocities and enormous relativistic effects occur.
It's very interesting but not the one I thought.
I was born in 1954 so I have no memory of Eisenhowers Presidency.
I learned a lot about this period from this book.
I read a book about the building of the interstate highway system and it said Ike wasn't very interested in it.
But this book says he thought it was an important part of his legacy.
This book also shows the Eisenhower wasn't much interested in civil rights.
He sent regular troops into Little Rock, not so much to protect the kids but to demonstrate that Federal laws superseded States rules.
Well worth reading, especially if you don't have much knowledge about this time period.
I haven't read a lot of Tom Swift, a few of the original books, maybe 1 or 2 of the later ones.So I can't really compare this to them.But I thought it was a fun, quick read for the target audience.I think I would have liked this when I was about 10-12.I think it is actually more like the [b:Danny Dunn and the Anti-Gravity Paint 727364 Danny Dunn and the Anti-Gravity Paint (Danny Dunn, # 1) Jay Williams https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1259874952l/727364.SY75.jpg 713579] books than the original Tom Swift.
It's a pretty good mystery and I like Agent Coldmoon.
But there were two things in the book I didn't like.
The non-spoiler thing is the now standard scene of Pendergast crawling around the crime scene,
picking up invisible things with a tweezers and putting them in test tubes that magically appear out of whatever he is wearing.
We almost never have a later scene in which Pendergast announces that after examining the single hair he found, he knew the killer owned an Albanian Moose Hound or something and that answers some question in the investigation.
So whats the point of the scene? We already know Pendergast is smarter than anybody.
Now the spoilery bit.
The motives of the father serial killer are sort of explained.But I don't get why he needs to kill several people as killing one would have made his point.Then, after botching his first solo kill, the son serial killer starts killing people in a completely different way and for no explained reason.The father taught the son how to do a specific kind of murder but then the son does a completely different murder while using capitalized words like Atone and Action to make it look almost religious.In the end of the book, there is no explanation as to why the son is doing murders.We get a fairly detailed analysis of the father but the sons motivation is missing.
An alternate universe where America lost the Revolutionary War and is still a colony of England.
And Gus Washington ( descendant of our George) is building a tunnel under the Atlantic.
He is working with a descendant of Isambard Brunel (if you don't know about him you should)
and dating Brunels daughter.
It's a great story of a massive engineering exercise.
Lots of fun and recommended
But there is a part I didn't get.
Starting at both sides, they have built tunnels out from North America (Nova Scotia) and England (Wales) out to the end of the continental shelf.
But for some reason, it is vitally important for Washington to get from New York To London
so he can be on the first train from London out to the edge of the shelf.
So there is a crazy adventure involving going back and forth between Nova Scotia and New York, then a ride in a crazy helicopter that crashes, then (I think) into a jet airplane and then on a rocket and finally an ordinary train. All this involves extreme danger but I have no idea why it was important. Oh, and I think Washington has to jump from a speeding race car onto a moving train.
Mysteries, jokes and mad science and/or magic.
Wonderful artwork.
Underwater adventures, new species and we learn more about some characters.
Start at GirlGeniusOnline.com to read the strips from the beginning.
I prefer buying the collections and reading months worth of strips at one sitting.
Highly recommended.
This was published in 1952, well before actual spaceflight began.
It's set about 200 years after spaceflight began but the pilots and ships
don't have computers and the engines sound more like steam engines than actual rockets.
The author put more effort than usual to get the descriptions of the planets and their relative distances correct.
I think large parts of this book could have been used to describe a boat race around the Pacific.
So it's kind of interesting historically but don't work too hard to find a copy.
I recall reading this book long ago and thinking it was pretty good.
I wanted to see if it held up so I read it again.
And it doesn't hold up.
There is actually very little plot and the characters were hard to tell apart.
Most of the Earth is under a mile of ice and our heroes are exiled to the surface from New York
because they dared to communicate with people in London.
While traveling across the ice to England, they meet a surprising number of people living on the ice.
They encounter people who have reverted back to early hominid culture, another group who are similar to pre-Columbian Native Americans and some Vikings.
Somehow these people live exclusively on moose and/or walruses (the moose somehow live on algae)
and have fires and wooden ships even though there are no trees on the ice.
Most of these encounters are violent but luckily one of our heroes knows Judo and they have some
kind of combination flame thrower/disintegrator ray.
They travel in solar powered sleighs where they are exposed to the elements, kind of like a
big snowmobile.
All of this sounds silly to me now, but teenage me thought it was a cool adventure.
Young me was also oblivious to the sexism in the book.
A lot of SF books from the 1960s and before and women in only stereotypical roles.
But this book essentially has no women in it.
About the only reference to women is when one of the primitive peoples they encounter is described as ‘screaming like a woman'.
So I was disappointed in the book and can't recommend it.
I have a few others that I am rereading and I hope they hold up better.
