Customer Reviews

Containment

5 star:		(142)
4 star:		(92)
3 star:		(49)
2 star:		(42)
1 star:		(35)

 

 

Mr. Cantrell has written a very tight story with Containment. The characters are believable. The references to modern science are accurate (at least the ones in my field were) and insightful. I felt like I was given just enough to connect with the main character and to understand his connection (or lack thereof) to the world around him. There was no extraneous fluff in this story which was appropriate for a tale about a space colony surviving on the bare necessities. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this novel and started downloading more of his work as soon as I finished this piece.

I would compare Cantrell to Asimov in style and substance, which is high praise. Containment contains several of the key ingredients of classic science fiction. The technology, the people, the plot within a plot within a plot, and the questioning of what is real all made me feel like I was reading the work of an up-and-coming scifi genius. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and would highly recommend it to anyone looking for a good scifi read.

Just finished Containment and thoroughly enjoyed it! A first rate book with a riveting plot. Christian Cantrell's writing and storytelling are so polished, I'd rate it every bit as good as Asimov or Bradbury. This book is so interesting and very suspenseful. Although I'm "known" for guessing endings, the twist was a complete surprise. The clues were all there, I just didn't put them together. That's really refreshing. Except for work-sleep-eat, I couldn't put this book down. It's fast paced and gripping. You'll love it!

This author, Cantrell, took a very interesting idea for a plot and extended it into a potentially captivating story line with neat tech, a good dilemma, and likable and interesting characters, but then was overcome by his experience in IT: too many words that are not "action" and do not directly sustain the pace of the story. For instance he spends 4+ pages describing a new computer interface (replaces the mouse, keyboard, etc.) that, while related to plot nuance, did not require a full historic review of more than 1/4th this text. Likewise several chapters on the history of Space Exploration and Colonization. Also he tends to describe "about what happened" instead of actually running the active scene so we can directly experience it. Whoever compared him to Asimov should go back and reread Asimov, he was all about actually "running the scene" so a reader could live it directly. While a fine communicator, Cantrell needs to learn forget most of the background filler and trust his skills to write each moment as it happens. The best author examples of this are Iain Banks and Larry Niven, both pull you excitingly through new tech and surroundings via the action as it unfolds. Cantrell needs better editors who push him to cut the chatter and deliver the electricity of the action.

To begin, I guess I would say that I was surprised at all of the very highly ranked reviews out there. Many of the reviews talk about how well the story is written, how tightly the plot is woven, and the overall quality of the science fiction. However, the book doesn't end, and this left me feeling cheated that I had committed time to reading a book without a conclusion. In fact, the ending came so quickly that I thought the Kindle edition must have been missing sections that appeared in the print version. It just didn't seem plausible to me that an editor would allow a book to be submitted without it being finished. The best analogy I can think of, would be reading a Sherlock Holmes novel in which Homes states to Watson that the conclusion is "elementary", and then the book ends, leaving the reader to figure out how the crime was actually committed.

This feeling of abruptness started to occur about halfway through the book, right at the same time as the plot starts to grab you. As mentioned in several other reviews, there are several very interesting twists, and they are all very compelling. The reader finds themselves with lots of questions, and trying to figure out what is happening. However, there is one plot twist which is illogical, considering that the main characters are all a group of scientists, who have been extensively studying their environment and performing experiments for the past twenty years. I don't want to give away any surprises from the book, but basically there is something different about the characters' environment which should be glaringly obvious to any individual who is a scientist, and is doing regular testing on their environment. It is sort of like the main character being told that it never rains outside, although they know what rain is, what it looks like, and what happens after it rains (i.e. things get wet). And yet, every day when they go outside to check their experiment, they can't help but notice that the ground and everything in their experiment is wet, as if from a recent rainfall. If it were later revealed in the book that it actually rains every day, you would be aggravated at why the main character didn't notice this years ago. The main plot twist in the book left me feeling this way as well, precisely because the main character is able to verify the difference so quickly, and it should have been apparent in experiments he and his colleagues have been performing for years.

It is very sad, because I was really enjoying this book, but then started to be bothered by the questions weren't being answered by the story. There is no mention of a sequel, and honestly I would be hard pressed to pick up another book by this author, let alone the next book in the series. One of the worst sins in writing that an author can make is to forget his audience, and unfortunately I think that happened with this story. Many reviewers who read this book sounded as if they were very satisfied. I am surprised by this, but respect their point of view. But those of you out there who feel as if you would get aggravated if you were watching a great movie and then had to leave ten minutes before the ending, may feel cheated. ("No Luke, I am your..." whoops! Time to go!)

The central plot of this novel was very interesting, but it was let down by a number of things:
1. An IMMENSE amount of incredibly dry exposition on how `smart people' think and how rather dull machines work, which caused me to skip over large swathes of text. I swear to god that this stuff made up at least a third of the novel. If this author wants to learn how to write interesting technobabble, he needs to read Iain M Banks.
2. Little to no character development - how am I supposed to be engaged by a book when I don't give a flying rat's you-know-what about the people in it?
3. Plot inconsistencies and lack of explanation for things you'd think would be very important. Another reviewer has already described the discrepancy to do with the scientists and their environment and how they'd have to be dumb to not figure out what is revealed to us in the final chapters, so I won't go into that - but there were a million other tiny things, like the `homeless', the adoption scenario etc that were simply not expounded upon, much to my dissatisfaction.
4. The ending. MY GOD, the ending. Talk about rushed, illogical, without foreshadowing, without explanation, melodramatic and unsatisfying. It's like there were another 3 or 4 chapters and he decided, in a fit of pique, to chop them off to irritate his readers. Or that he was trying to leave room for a sequel, but was just incredibly clumsy about it. Gah.
Anyway, I gave this two stars instead of one, because the guy's ideas are good. He just REALLY REALLY needs to work on his execution, and stop padding out his stories with redundant nonsense. This book could have been an excellent short story, instead of an overblown, boring novel. Disappointing.

I have no idea how other reviewers could compare this to Asimov... this is a really badly constructed book. I actually thought that the chapters in the kindle edition had been mis-numbered. The story (when it has a story) jumps from the future to the past to the present with no literary warning. I would think that I was still reading a section set in the stories "present" (or past or future) and then realize that it had switched again... this led to endless confusion. But if that had been the only issue, I would have simply put it down to poor construction by the author and editor. However, the writing itself was little better than a series of science-related "essays" or "white papers" that went into FAR too much pedantic detail and then were stitched together with only a few lines or paragraphs of "story"... (like a novel written by Dustin Hoffmans character in the movie "Rain Man").

And I have to say that it was one of the most unsatisfying endings I have EVER read in a life filled with reading... questions were left unanswered, conflicts and plot lines left hanging... even if the author was trying to set up for a sequel or a series, it cut off so abruptly that I (AGAIN) thought that my kindle had accidentally forgot to download the final chapter(s)...

On the "Pro" side... it had some interesting discussions about technical solutions to problems (but again, they were usually so overly detailed without being truly enlightening that they became huge speed bumps in the story)....

All of that being said... I have to wonder about the rave review some folks offered... were they planted? This story (and "Brainbox" by this same author), are so incredibly badly constructed that unless you want to end your reading of them by flipping the bird to your book/kindle out of sheer frustration... avoid them.

I've no idea if there is meant to be some kind of sequel or not as this books seems to end about halfway through the story. There seems to be a pretty fun explanation of the tech, the characters are ok, the plot progression works well, but just as there is meant to be the big expose the novel ends. It's a bit of a wtf moment.

This book is heavy on the science. You can tell the author put a lot of research, and a lot of thought into this book. At times though the science got tedious. Don't get me wrong, I love a lot of science in my science fiction, but toward the end of the book I started skimming through the lengthy details to see what happened.

That was not what made me decide to give this book only 3 stars though. Despite being somewhat slow at times, I found the story interesting, and there were several major plot twists that really threw me. What made this book lose stars for me was the ending. I had read some of the reviews before buying this book, so I knew to expect an abrupt ending. But I was not prepared for how abrupt it was.

Say you are watching the movie Avatar, and the movie suddenly ends with the army guys blowing up the tree. This ending leaves you unsatisfied. The movie makers say, don't worry, there will be a sequel. But that really doesn't solve the first movie's problem. And it makes you feel like they ended that way to force you to see the sequel. That is this books problem. Even if there is going to be a sequel, the ending to this book is so unfulfilling that I don't think I want to read the next book. With all of the detail that was put into this book I do not think it is asking too much for a few extra pages to explain what exactly happened. Honestly I am not even sure what happened at the end.

The book was good writing if slow at times. But the ending will leave you feeling like you got played.

I'll try not to spoil too much, but I really don't think you should read this so I'm not going to worry about telling you things that are revealed early in the book.

This is a pretty lousy book. To summarize in one word why, let me tell you this: exposition.

This isn't so much a novel as an imagining of a future world with various interesting future technologies that we might someday achieve. It isn't a story. It doesn't have characters. It has people-shaped props that allow the author to tell you about ideas he finds interesting, be they electronics, sociology, morality, or politics.

What "characters" there are are zero or one-dimensional. The main character is a genius, strong, good looking, and the pinnacle of human achievement. I mean the last part literally; he is called that by one of the leaders of his colony very early in the story. He has no flaw that is revealed during the story, and additionally has unique powers of the mind that make him the best programmer in history and also the most talented biologist. He also has a wife (with whom he has zero chemistry, although that may be intentional), a best friend (also no chemistry, this character's sole purpose is to do things the main character cannot do for one reason or another), and a father (for wise-sounding advice). Other faces you might meet are his teacher who told him to question everything, a sort-of creepy colony manager, and various red shirts.

Besides characters, Containment's plot is also nonexistent for the first fifty percent of the book. The first part is dominated by a fairly boring description of a stereotypical colony on Venus. Daily life and daily technology are the subject of almost continuous exposition. Three of the first nine chapters are LITERALLY history lessons in Cantrell's imagined universe. He occasionally makes weak attempts to mask this exposition. For example, the entirety of the thirteenth chapter is a back and forth question and answer session between two characters about the functions of a certain part of a colony. But this is lazy stuff, and it's really not much better than the walls of expository text we're treated with in the rest of the book.

The end of the book has a suitable number of plot twists, many of them telegraphed fairly early in the story. As soon as the first one occurs, you can probably make a guess about how the story will end and be not far from the truth.

Considering this book's only merits are in its mildly interesting technical ideas, Cantrell makes a few unforgivable mistakes. For example, toward the end of the book he has one of his characters take a lethal dose of atmospheric radiation in about forty minutes of exposure. Supposedly, this radiation would have come from events at least twenty years prior to the book's setting (the character receiving said dose is not aware of any nuclear events and is about twenty years old). So the event is still producing Chernobyl-control-room-during-meltdown-levels of atmospheric radiation twenty years after the fact? And someone survived these events? To pick one other example, the idea that humans have access to efficient fusion power and still need to use plants to make oxygen seems silly, although it is critical for the plot.

I'm not too upset about all this because I only paid a dollar for the book. However, if I knew what I do now, I would not have read it even of someone paid me. It's not worth the time. Do not buy this book. It is amateur on a level I've never encountered before in Amazon's recommendations for me.