Customer Reviews

THE BLACK HOLE

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This novelization was so much better than the movie. It flowed and did not get caught up in the special effects for kids that the movie featured.

If you thought the movie lacked something--it's in this novelization.

I picked up this novelization to find out what in the world happened at the end of the movie. In almost all cases the book is better than the movie, but not this time. If you want a coherent ending, this book disappoints. The last page (213) of my 1979 Del Rey / Ballantine edition has hanging sentences and paragraphs that have no beginning. Seems like someone else didn't know how to end this book either, so they choose not to.
I had to press forward through the first fifty pages but the middle and most of the ending is a great read - burn the last three pages.
This is not a kiddie book. A good read for young adults and adults. It is refreshing to read a novelization using vocabulary like "desiccation", "subsumed", "quiescent", and "stanchion". I appreciated the major themes, such as good and evil, more with the book than the film.
Not a bad little science fiction jaunt with a fascinating topic. A better ending would have helped tremendously.

I have read several Alan Dean Foster books. He's a great storyteller. I found this book to be good but not as good as Alien for example. Maybe it's me. Alien freaked me out in the book and the movie. This book and its movie were simply "good". This book had great writing as usual for Foster but the topic just didn't get me all spooked. Outland was another that he wrote that was better imo. The movie was better as well.

You can't go wrong with Foster. I would recommend this as a good book.

Aliens: A Novelization

Outland: The Novelization

The Black Hole by Alan Dean Foster was a science fiction novel for me. I mean that it was predictable for me because it involved things like space ships, robots, lots of technology that the author must explain to the reader, and a large chunk of the story being devoted completely to these and other complex explanations. I find that characterization in a lot of novels like this gets forgotten about when it comes to descriptions of futuristic things. Still, I was drawn in (no pun intended) by the title. I have always had a fascination for things like tornadoes and giant whirlpools. Nature is fascinating and in this book, Foster describes the black hole as "nature gone insane." The book held my interest because of the descriptions of the black hole throu-out, but failed to really interest me in anything else. The basic story of a ship exploring deep space for other life and coming across a much larger ship near a massive black hole (a ship that was supposed to be lost forever) is intriguing, especially when we learn that the captain of the ship is planning on traveling through the black hole in the name of science and insanity and so on.
In short, a science fiction novel with all of the stereotypes firmly in place with an ending interesting enough to me to give it three stars for the amount of entertainment I got out of it. I will shortly forget the major details but the ending will stick with me.

Star Wars took the world by storm, and sci-fi was really hot for a few years around 1979, where experienced writer Alan Dean Foster -- who has had more than his share of books adapted into Hollywood blockbusters -- did his best. To his credit, he's an intelligent, insightful writer. Problem: this book has a basically good premise, but can't go farther than that, so ends up with the depth of an episode of "The A-Team": brave scientists including beautiful woman scientist go far from their comfort zones to confront evil mad genius, then stuff goes wrong, then suddenly we're into a 1970s LSD-inspired hippie scene. It's about that bad. The first third of this book is compelling, the second third is without any real activity and so is dull as mud, and the final third is a really bad Star Trek episode colliding with a stoner movie, and making about as much sense. I don't know why I ended up reading to the end, but I did, and I'm writing this review to save you from the same fate.

There's been one good attempt at a cute movie robot that I can think of, and that one doesn't talk, and gets strapped into the back of Luke Skywalker's X-Wing quite a bit, too.

Here we have a mission to find out what went wrong with a spaceship - the answer basically boiling down to a very bad man, and a black hole.

The investigating crew gets caught up in these problems, and it isn't the best idea to have problems next to a black hole.

Slightly dodgy ending, too.

Alan Dean Foster is a prolific science fiction writer and he occasionally novelizes screenplays (he also wrote "The Thing" and "Alien") and here he takes the plot for the abysmal 1979 Disney film "The Black Hole" and makes it come alive. The plot concerns a deep space mission to search out intelligent life via the spaceship Palomino, who eventually come across a ghost ship of sorts: The Cygnus, long believed to be lost amongst the stars. However, the captain of the Cygnus has a grandiose plan befitting the mad scientist that he is: he plans to travel through a black hole.