From /tmp/sf.3694 Sun Nov 8 23:05:21 1992 Path: lysator.liu.se!fizban.solace.hsh.se!kitten.umdc.umu.se!sunic!mcsun!uknet!stl!bnrgate!corpgate!news.utdallas.edu!convex!convex!darwin.sura.net!spool.mu.edu!agate!ames!ig!dont-reply-to-paths From: sheol!throopw@dg-rtp.dg.com (Wayne Throop) Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews Subject: FLARE by Thomas T. Thomas and Roger Zelazny Message-ID: <718946855@sheol.UUCP> Date: 13 Oct 92 22:49:51 GMT Sender: mcb@presto.ig.com Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Lines: 96 Approved: mcb@presto.ig.com (rec.arts.sf.reviews moderator) Thomas T. Thomas is turning into a pet peeve of mine. His first novel was _The_Doomsday_Effect_, under the name of Thomas Wren (which I suspect might have been a cheap trick on the part of Baen books to try to sucker in fans of Timothy Zahn by placing the book in the "right" place in Walnuts or Daldens, and imitating the cover style and font in which Zahn's name occurred in current releases at that time). This book had the most wretched, mangled, obnoxiously BAD science imaginable. It was about a black hole, and it had just about every error one could make about orbital dynamics, as well as treating the bogosity "adding antimatter to a black hole will make it evaporate" as a well-known scientific fact. Ghak. Yet he won some "best new hard SF writer" award or other for this piece of drivel. Double Ghak. At the time, I thought that (horrible as his first book was) he might show some promise if he stayed away from the technical stuff and just told some sort of adventure story with an SF background. Since he teamed up with Zelazny for this book, and since Zelazny has traditionally stayed away from technical details, I thought I'd give it a try and see what's up. I now grok that this was a mistake. I see none of Zelazny's touch at all, and suspect his name was simply there to sucker folks such as myself into buying it. And far from staying away from the technical points, TTT revels in long, rambling sections of purple prose about various technical details, complete with his usual blunders. Richard Geis praises it highly in a cover blurb, paying particular attention to TTT's "special knowledge and insights". Where he found these is a mystery to me. Quite the opposite. For some examples, TTT goes over in horrid detail how hydrogen fusion is supposed to proceed in the sun, without ever mentioning the Bethe cycle or anything else remotely like what is actually thought to occur. He measures "electrical potential" in watts. And perhaps worst of all, one of the central gimmicks of the book is a solar-sailer freighter which is supposed to shuttle back and forth between earth and one of the gas giants at 200 miles per second, using gravity slings at the endpoints. Trying a gravity-based course change around earth by kissing the atmosphere at 200 miles per second would allow one to change course by less than a tenth of a degree! Even if one were to attempt to make a 90 degree "turn" at a quarter million miles distance, it would take almost 50 g acceleration for a kilosecond or so. To say nothing about how loading and offloading of cargo was supposed to occur. He mangles computer terms, and has a program "dithering" when it should be "antialiasing". And then he manages to completely misunderstand and mangle quantum chromodynamics in a little bit of completely irrelevant fluff at the end of the book. The actual plot of the book is vanilla enough: after a long period of solar inactivity (similar to the "Maunder minimum" of a while back), folks have gotten used to being in space without sufficient protection against sunspot and flare activity. A mother-of-all-solar-flares comes along and the subsequent disaster is followed through the eyes of many diverse characters: in other words, a standard disaster story, but based on a quite interesting idea. But I found it totally unreadable. Though of course, I have a certain perverse attraction to such books, sticking it out to see just HOW bad it can get (and in this case, the answer is "REALLY bad"). I often wonder how it can be that bad, and consider the possibility that *I*'m the one who has no touch with basic physics: perhaps I'm totally mistaken about solar thermonucleonics, or maybe I'm just totally misunderstanding how TTT intends for his freightcraft to make the turns at the endpoints of its route, or maybe the color force and quarks don't operate the way I remember. But then I remember something so simple I couldn't POSSIBLY have it wrong, like the "electrical potential" in watts, and I say to myself "Nah! It really IS that bad!". And the greatest pity is that the fellow really seems to be an adequate author if he'd just steer clear of technical subjects. Instead, he wallows in them to the exclusion of most else. Finally, one of the most peculiar things about this is that Niven, in _Playgrounds_of_the_Mind_, says that it is an unforgivable sin for an SF author to say "infrared" when "ultraviolet" is meant and other such mistakes. Yet TTT regularly makes far worse gaffes than that, and even so I note on the bookshelves that Niven has one of TTT's stories in _Man_Kzin_Wars_[N]_ (for some value of N). What's the world coming to? You know, I feel much better now. Thanks for listening, y'all. %A Roger Zelazny %A Thomas T. Thomas %T Flare %I Baen Books %C New York %D September 1992 %G ISBN 0-671-72133-X %P 344 pp. -- Wayne Throop ...!mcnc!dg-rtp!sheol!throopw From /tmp/sf.4146 Tue Aug 9 01:50:25 1994 Path: liuida!sunic!pipex!howland.reston.ans.net!wupost!udel!news.sprintlink.net!dg-rtp!sheol!dont-reply-to-paths From: aaron@amisk.cs.ualberta.ca (Humphrey Aaron V) Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Subject: Prograde Reviews--Roger Zelazny & Thomas T. Thomas:Flare Approved: sfr%sheol@concert.net (rec.arts.sf.reviews moderator) Message-ID: <94Mar16.184507-0700.138893@amisk.cs.ualberta.ca> Date: 18 Mar 94 02:22:01 GMT Lines: 56 Roger Zelazny & Thomas T. Thomas:Flare [some spoilers] _Flare_ is, essentially, a disaster novel. Big solar flare happens, disrupts lots of stuff on Earth. The catch, in this case, is that it's 2081, and the sun has been quiescent for 80 years. No sunspots, no flares. People have forgotten how dangerous solar flares are, for the most part; radiation shielding for the settlements off Earth is considered an 'extra'. One scientist, the _only_ current sun scientist, is manning a Mercury-orbit space station to observe the sun. He _happens_ to see a huge sunspot pair start up, and the flare start out. The book is very fragmented. The closest we have to a plot involves the scientist, and his grad student on Earth who's trying to convince anyone that there's danger. But most of the book focuses on specific incidents related to the flare--the Moonwalkers who get a big radiation dose and a bunch of static on their headphones, the ship carrying trillions of tons of methane from Titan, the millions of people using VR headsets who get fried (including a fair chunk of people in the stock market)... All of the individual vignettes are interesting, but together they don't make a coherent plot. The writing is great; it's not Zelazny style as I know it, so Thomas must have some nontrivial share of it, as well as apparently supplying the impeccable scientific knowledge behind the book. I enjoyed reading it. But it has no plot. Also, as a disaster novel, it has a more-than-usual share of the cautionary tale in it. It depicts graphically the hazards of cost-cutting, and of relying too much on technology without a less sophisticated, but more reliable, backup. For instance, planes of 2081 have consoles accessible only via VR; after the flare, one pilot ends up having to look out the _window_ to try to see the ground, while the other responds to her spoken directions, wearing VR goggles to operate the instruments. There's also a jibe about the administration who won't listen to the doomsaying scientist who happens to be right... If you like hard SF and Analog-type stuff, you'll like the book. In that way, it's more Thomas than Zelazny... %A Zelazny, Roger %A Thomas, Thomas T. %T Flare %I Baen %C Riverdale, NY %D September 1992 %G ISBN 0-671-72133-X %P 344 pp. %O Paperback, US $4.99, Can $5.99 -- --Alfvaen(Editor of Communique) Current Album--Yello:One Second Current Read--Charles de Lint:Spiritwalk "curious george swung down the gorge/the ants took him apart" --billbill