Customer Reviews

Catch a Falling Star

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Seeing this book in a used bookstore, I snapped it up, and was not dissapointed.

The golden age of humanity has passed, leaving behind a self maintinging organic city where the story picks up. A hobbyist astronomer discovers a meteor headed for earth. He tries in vain to warn people but everyone is too self-centered or apathetic to bother paying attention.

So he sets off into the world searching for answers, and discovers not everyone has well cultured plants to live in. Brunner leads us through a strange and greately varied earth of the distant future.

Brunner's unique style grabs ahold and refuses to let go until the end of the last page.

I read this book in two nights or so, and I thought this book is interesting, but not among the greatest. It must be said that the story is original.
You see, in the future the human civilization decays, there are only few cities left and everyone is apathic (regarding this last part - maybe we are in that future). An astronomer finds that an asteroid will hit the Earth and wipe off the civilization. No one would listen to him, so he leaves looking for people to help, accepting with him everyone that likes to come. After some adventures he finds out that the ancestors were very... brilliant. I won't say more, just that the message is optimistic: it only takes one man to make a difference.

There are few books that I have kept nearby for as long as I have this novel. First read as a teen-ager in the late 70's, John Brunner's literary style and vivid discription embedded in me a love for a well-written jaunt through fantastic futures. A gem, a joy, this book will stay with me to enjoy over and over again for many years to come.

Rear cover half-synopsis: `A hundred thousand years from now, it was discovered that a star was approaching the world on a collision course. Its discoverer, Creohan, figured there might be time to save the world if he could arouse everyone to the danger.'

Creohan, who is housed in a mildly intelligent organic house hosting a telescope belonging to its prior occupant, spots bright star which becomes brighter and brighter with time. Consulting the Historickers, Creohan find that's that the approaching star has been approaching for millennia and will pass by earth in 288 years. With this knowledge he tells the townspeople who then dismiss his mourning as banal. Upon finding the free-spirited Chalyth, the couple begin a journey across the earth to search for other cities who they have lost contact with, to search for a technological civilization who have the power to catch a star, to save humanity, to allow humans to endure on their planet.

The quest that Creohan and Chalyth take themselves on spans wildly different landscapes, a wide scope of evolved or mutated humans, and a glimpse of fallen civilizations. The House of History or Tree of History is used to study the history of the planet's rise and fall of civilizations, each acquiring their own technology, their own ethos and their own catastrophe. Through the study of the past, the historians (histroickers) they hope the current civilization will live full and well, though each minor city is far and few between, the land and sea teeming with barbarians and heathens. The quest is epic for the pair and those who ally themselves with the bearers of bad news.

However, as the novel is only 158 pages, the epic quest is quite condensed and each chapter of six or so pages is a splash of action, a peppering of forging ahead, a swath of diversity. When progressing through 28 chapters of this, it's rather tiring and I would have liked to have many of the sections beefed up, each one adding some delicious value to the overall plot. As it is, each ort of a chapter barely sates ones speculative fiction pallet. A quest is a quest, so the inevitable divergences from a smooth plot is an expectation... but it would have been so much better to have seen this novel filled out to 400 pages or even a multi-book series akin to Jack L. Chalker's four-book series The Rings of The Master (which I was strongly reminded of while reading Catch a Falling Star). It's also a little bit like Brunner's own Maze of Stars.

Being a Brunner novel, it carries his like of bizarre forms of humanity, through evolution, mutation or manipulation but it's not his finest piece, of course. As an astute SF reader it's a certain addition to my Brunner shelf, but perhaps for the more fair-weather reader this might as well just be a pass.

Set in the very distant future, this book showcases the triumph of the human spirit even in the face of universal apathy.

Mr. Brunner's eclectic British compositional style (as evidenced by the opening sentence of the novel) makes this a challenging read, but the atmosphere and pace of the book make it both interesting and rewarding. Nice ending.