Customer Reviews

Cave of Stars

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

 

 

Zebrowski begins by introducing the reader to a far distant future culture whose government is a repressive descendant of the Catholic church set on a collision course with a technologically superior and long lived race of 'super humans'. Although some of the plot ideas are unique and fresh, the book crashes headlong through important plot elements including a love story which moves along as if the participants are on speed, and numerous mentioned but unexplored side plots that leave you looking rearward. Instead, Zebrowski chooses to explore doubts and lost faith in the leaders of the church as they are confronted by a seemingly perfect culture that ignores their doctrine. For all of this, these leaders remain bare ghosts, shallow and underdeveloped. Decades pass in the last 10 pages of the book, rushing through plot closure almost as if the number of contracted words had been reached. This book definitely left me wanting for more...or less.

I'm going to swim against the tide of earlier reviews here. I found Zebrowski's CAVE OF STARS engaging, and I enjoyed it for some of the very reasons the reviewers below disliked it.

I don't feel Zebrowski has constructed a polemic against the Catholic Church, or even against religion in general. Rather, he is exploring ways in which humanity defines, and sometimes perilously over-defines, what it calls "reality." Both cultures in this book, the primitive and the advanced, have lost themselves within fantasy constructs. That these faux-realities come into such violent conflict is intriguing; that they should so inevitably ensure one another's destruction, both physically and psychologically, held my attention from page Alpha to page Omega. Zebrowski dangled tidbits of hopes for survival throughout; then he gracefully snatched each away, to make his point and to make readers' hearts sink. His story does rush forward at the end ... showing the surviving humans rushing on toward new hopes, and toward one more round of fantasy construction. The conclusion leaves the reader (well, me at least) with the question: Is it our foolish, unceasing hopes for creating Reality in our own image and likeness that make us, as a race, so pathetically hopeless?

Zebrowski's writing rests firmly within the tradition of SF as a Literature of Ideas. That approach always runs the risk of subordinating character development to plot flow, but in this story ... in which faux-realities battle for the hearts and minds of the characters ... Zebrowski plays his pawns masterfully.

I was quite disappointed with this book. It appears that the author had a problem with the Catholic faith and needed to vent his issues in public.

The characters are shallow; without dimension. At each crisis point the reader is left wanting more. The conclusion of the book skips over decades as if to just get it done.

The editorial above compares this book to Dune. For those of us who have read the Dune series, this book will not come close.