Customer Reviews

Achilles' Choice

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3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Larry Niven (and his co-authors) usually write something either memorable or entertaining. ACHILLES CHOICE is neither. The authors (three of them!) reach hard to impress the reader by mixing references to the current "exciting" mass appeal physics of Chaos Theory. They then proceed to make flat characters behave in ways that no one with any experience would believe they would act. Not very typical Niven - not very good. Two stars because you CAN read the whole thing.

This novel is about love, life and sport. Based on a future Olympics where not only physical perfection is required but also extreme intelligence. It is a story where the nobel prize is inspired by elite athletes, and practical meets theoretical. It is a story of choices. Choose wrong and you may die. Either way you need to be fully committed to your descisions. If you are going to aim high in life then this is where you would be.

Achilles Choice was a light but enjoyable read. I am looking forward to a sequel.

I would recommend this novel for the age group 8-22 years of age. If you are an older reader the predictability of the storyline may be discouraging.

This story follows a young athlete as she trains for the new Olympics, which include intellectual competition and a de facto death sentence for the those who fail to take the gold. Sounds exciting, doesn't it? Ah, well. I have read of number of Larry Niven novels, and I understand the premise that maybe a book can be just a ripping good adventure, and not a contribution to world lit. But, ack, this was horrible. You will find the characters cliched, the plot "twists" too easy to figure out, and the ending is either a cop out because the author had filled the requisit number of pages, or a cheap way to prep for a sequel.

Honestly, the cover is so fantastically campy that I had to read it. I found it while shelving books at the library where I work.

The story was not too painful, especially if you skim through it, and the Boris Vallejo illustrations sprinkled throughout the book were my reward for sludging through the text. They're kind of like the marshmallows in my Lucky Charms. Awesome.

Reading Larry Niven's thoughts on the publishing world in "Playgrounds of the Mind" and "N Space" gives a good insight into why this book was published: simply to fulfill a contract. As usual, the concept is very strong. The story develops nicely and then ends in mid-thought. As an avowed Larry Niven fan, I was extremely disappointed.

Honestly, the cover is so fantastically campy that I had to read it. I found it while shelving books at the library where I work.

The story was not too painful, especially if you skim through it, and the Boris Vallejo illustrations sprinkled throughout the book were my reward for sludging through the text. They're kind of like the marshmallows in my Lucky Charms. Awesome.

I've read most of the collaborations that involve Larry Niven; I think Mr. Niven is the perfect example of why author collaborations can be a good idea. The man has absolutely brilliant ideas, but he is really not much of a writer, so if the idea itself is not enough to carry you, the prose won't do it either -- this is why Ringworld is a watershed work in the science fiction world, but I couldn't finish reading it.

Niven and Barnes are one of the better collaborative teams, though not as good as Niven and Jerry Pournelle; Niven and Pournelle complement each other perfectly (Niven is a fair-to-middling writer with great ideas, Pournelle is an excellent writer with mediocre ideas), whereas Steven Barnes is actually a good writer all by himself, and thus doesn't mesh as well with Niven. And -- oh, it's illustrated by Boris Vallejo! Well, alright then: let's read about muscly women in skimpy outifts.

And that's much of the book. The premise is fairly interesting: the Olympics of the future has become a testing ground for the best and the brightest; athletes now have to participate in academic and artistic events along with their athletic events. As the world has moved toward a one-world, corporate-run society, the Olympics is less about national pride. But now there's a twist: athletes can opt to undergo a surgical procedure, called the Boost, that increases their nerve output and makes them quicker, stronger, more coordinated, and also able to think faster and heal better. But it kills them within eight or nine years, and so they only get two Olympics to try for the ultimate prize before they become too damaged to compete -- though if they win, they become Linked, one of the elite members of the ruling class, and they are given a means of managing their screwed-up bodies that gives them back their lifespan. So it's all or nothing: win enough gold medals and get chosen to survive, or fail and die. Since most of the athletes choose to Boost, there is no other option -- an unBoosted person simply can't compete with the Boosted ones.

So it fits in well with our modern version of sports, what with steroids and manic over-training to maintain a competitive edge, and I like that. I love the idea that the athletes have to be complete, rather than one-trick monkeys like our modern overpaid mindless amoral hulks. I like the heroine, to some extent, though there are some annoying things about her, too. But the message of the book is too focused on competition as a means of fixing everything. Too capitalistic for my tastes. I mean, the world has become a single peaceful society, and war is a thing of the past; however, the oligarchy in charge of the world has intentionally kept society from becoming a utopia, because they, like so many other futuristic societies I have read or seen in movies, have realized that a perfect world is self-defeating, that elementary chaos theory as well as a simple reading of human nature shows that people, given paradise, will find a way to mess it up. Okay, I got that; I may even agree, though I think we could find a new concept of what "mess it up" means that would lead to a utopia that we would see as perfection -- like, they live in peace and harmony but they all dress really badly, or something. But the underlying idea is that the heroine is the savior of this society, that she will be the one who fixes all of the problems and makes it better -- and they had to find her through the Olympics. She had to win an athletic contest, after Boosting, to prove herself worthy. The authors tried to construe it as evidence that she'd never give up, that she was willing to do anything to be the best, but come on. The character from Pursuit of Happyness is a far better example of determination than someone who is willing to kill themselves in order to win a goddamn sports event.

Anyway, it was a one-day read, and the Vallejo pictures were actually quite nice; since this was about hyper-athletic people, his usual depiction of perfect human musculature was appropriate here. It was good enough to read.

A short, entertaining, illustrated novel. Nothing too flash about it other than that. A woman decides to compete in an all-encompassing super-olympic style competition to enter society's elite.

The only way to win is to take a drug to boost your performance. This drug will kill you in a few years, unless you do manage to win and get into the elite and get treatment.

Behind all this is a conspiracy, and the woman involved discovers there is something not nice going on. Well, not nice compared to the get rid of competitors and other repression that is already going on, anyway.

Achilles' Choice delves into a future evolution of the Olympics in which life is the ticket to enter. This extreme development of sports is expressed through the people most involved--the athletes. The characters , especially Jillian Shomer, are magnificently expressed in their actions and thoughts. The reader can easily feel the heated struggle of competition and the agony over moral and life dilemmas faced by Jullian. Furthermore, these future competitors are extremely applicable to today's athletes, and connect the reader to the harsh life and choices these talented people face. A great read.

Here's the deal, kids -- if you have never read any Larry Niven, go read almost anything else he has ever written or collaborated in writing or even done an introduction for. Do that, and the odds are really good that you'll wind up reading everything he's ever written, and find yourself haunting the bookstores and logging on to Amazon daily hoping he'll write something more for you.

Read this book last out of all the things he's written.

If you've already read everything else he's written, then you might as well read this and have that feeling of completion.

OK, it really isn't all that bad -- but Niven is a great writer, and other things he's done with Barnes have been very good (I have not read any solo efforts by Barnes)and so this one is just so TANJed disappointing.