41 of 48 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Jack -- HOW COULD YOU?, April 7, 2008
This review is from: Cauldron (Hardcover)
As the finale of the "Engines of God" series, this book is the anti-climax to end all anti-climaxes. "The Engines of God" was just about perfect: excitingly paced, with a wonderful, complex mystery at its heart. Huge, brilliant ideas were presented in an extremely readable way. It was so good, I read the entire thing out loud to my spouse.
Warning: spoilers ahead... not that it really matters.
As the series continued in later books, we got a few side trips and red herrings, but the galaxy-spanning mystery was still magnificent and seemed to only grow deeper and richer the more we learned. When at last, Hutch offers her theory for the mystery's origin -- objects d'art from a hyper-advanced race -- I was blown away. I loved this idea and it had my imagination buzzing for weeks. THE SERIES SHOULD HAVE ENDED HERE.
But... then we got an utterly pointless rip-off of Rendezvous With Rama ("Chindi") and an equally pointless detour to visit the Moonriders, which went nowhere.
And now... Cauldron. What a turkey, and what a massively bungled way to end the series.
Where to even begin?
* The first two-thirds of the book are excruciatingly boring. Hutch is old, and space travel is on the ropes. Got it. Why wasn't this dealt with in a single chapter, instead of hundreds of pages?
* Despite all this time for character drawing, by the end of the book, I realized all of the non-Hutch characters shared roughly the same face in my mind's eye. The only thing that distinguishes one character from another is their name. Also, it's 500 years in the future and everybody is still named Jon and Rudy and so on?
* The serial mysteries that are described in the final third of the book are just silly. There's a race of cartoon creatures who act like Keystone Cops and live forever. There's an abandoned planet that has the remains of a civilization -- normally fertile ground for Mr. McDevitt's tales -- that turns out to be pointless and one of the characters dies there. Whatever. The "lighthouse" near a black hole is interesting, but takes up only a few pages. What's up with throwing a great idea away like that?
* The mystery of the omega clouds is revealed to be... drumroll please... THE MONSTER FROM STAR TREK V???? What???? Let me get this straight: this thing can breathe vacuum, it can generate hyper-advanced nanotech at will, it can instantly communicate with an alien species, it has lived for millions of years, but it can't pull itself out of a ditch? Why not? If it's simply the gravity of the galactic center holding it in place, why can the human ships navigate it so easily?
* Why does the animal have eyes? If it can build the clouds and a replica of a human ship in an instant, what use would it have with the visual spectrum?
* Why is it so stupid?
* It already had its hands on their ship -- what more did it need to copy their design?
* At first, they can only communicate with it through sign language, which sets up all sorts of interesting challenges, but then it speaks to them in English. Cop-out! And what's up with these alien races being able to speak perfect English, like the Moonriders? This is lazy!
* How is it possible the monster is unaware of other life forms in the galaxy? From this series alone, we've learned of about a dozen or so in a relatively small volume of space.
* Most important of all: what happened to the sense of awe and wonder? I got the sense that Mr. McDevitt just couldn't care less about this book, and that is devastating to me. Why put love into a pointless knock-off like "Chindi" and leave just a handful of pages here for resolving one of the great mysteries in the last few decades of speculative fiction?
Why? Why?
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27 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
A truly disappointing read, January 28, 2008
This review is from: Cauldron (Hardcover)
I've enjoyed all that I've read of Jack McDevitt's previous works, but I'm afraid that "Cauldron" was a deep disappointment. The previous books in the "Academy" series were well written and typically fast paced ("Odyssey" got a little slow at times,) but this particular piece was uncharacteristically dull and more than a bit dry.
The first HALF of the book is spent discussing the development and testing of a new FTL drive. Very few of these two hundred or so pages are even remotely interesting, and are often somewhat infuriating in their slow, plodding pace. The core "dilemma" of the first half of the novel revolves around a testing procedure and the world's top minds failing to conceive of a simple principle: test your potentially explosive initial prototype on the simplest (and least expensive) framework possible. Then again, without this ridiculous plot element, McDevitt would only have had half a book.
The remainder of the book feels like the author's attempt to close up a number of dangling loose ends from earlier in the series... all at once. Each remaining mystery -- including the origins of the Chindi, the Omega Clouds, and a millenia old alien radio transmission -- is resolved in a few dozen dull pages. And those disappointed by Star Trek V (yeah, the one with Spock's brother) may very well be moved to fits of hysterical rage by the novel's ending.
McDevitt seems to be stuck on a few simple themes: governments and taxpayers are uninterested in funding space exploration, technological civilizations are rare and typically manage to destroy or at least cripple themselves pretty quickly, and human beings appear to be the only species capable of developing FTL travel. Each is an entertaining topic, to be sure, but Jack McDevitt seems to be obsessed with repeating them over and over, ultimately to the ruination of what appears to be the final volume in an otherwise excellent series.
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13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Another negative review, February 21, 2008
This review is from: Cauldron (Hardcover)
I concur with the preceding negative reviews: this book plods through a tedious buildup and meanders to an unconvincing end. The first more than half involves people who are not interesting in themselves, doing very little. I skimmed and skipped many pages. When the characteristic McDevitt space adventure finally gets going, it gains suspense only because the characters behave in extremely careless, foolish ways. It was just not credible to me that professionals with the level of training and experience that Hutch et.al. are supposed to have had, would take the risks that these people do -- or would do the really stupid things they do, like completely botching the second-ever contact with a nonhuman intelligent race. All the adventure comes from people extricating themselves from fixes into which they never should have gotten. Don't wait for the paperback; don't wait at all. Remember the McDevitt of OMEGA, and move on.
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