Customer Reviews

The Core

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When books are based on screenplays, you have to try and figure out what of the book is original to the author and what originates in the screenplay. This book is no different.

Imagine the movie Armageddon, but with the heroes traveling in the opposite direction. Like in Armageddon, a series of sudden events leads to the discovery that the world is about to be destroyed. A team is assembled, trained, and launched into the interior of the planet carrying a massive nuclear payload (1000 megatons).

There are perils along the way and the action moves at a very quick pace. Definitely fun.

Also like Armageddon, most of accepted physics is thrown out the window (and some really stupid designs in the ship).

All of this is very nicely captured and retold by Mr. Smith. Action movies appeal to a different set of brain cells than novels, but Smith does a very good job of getting the feeling of the movie across in book form.

This is a very good adaptation of a silly action movie (it is also cheaper than an average theater ticket and will last most readers more than two hours).

Not to be confused with Deepcore, the boring film Terry Farrell left Deep Space Nine for.

This book, which is based on the screenplay of the movie, is chock full of pseudo scientific jibberish. As a geologist, I was curious to read a book about the core of the earth. Here was an opportunity to educate as well as entertain. Sadly, many details which were not vital to the plot were simply invented. A few specific issues:
1. As they travel through the ocean crust, which through drilling among other things we know to be made of basalt, the comment that it is "granite, as expected"

2. Air in a geode would not survive at the high pressures experienced in the mantle. The cobalt shell, which would have a hardness of about 5 on Mohs scale(diamond, which tops the scale has a hardness of 10) would not be able to prevent the pressure from crushing the geode.
3. When going through the (as they say) "granitic" oceanic crust, which in the Marianas Trench would be 180 million years old, you would certainly not find mammoth fossils because:
Granite is an igneous rock which forms from the crystallization of a magma. The tremendously unlucky Mammoth who somehow wandered several km below the surface of the earth to the magma chamber would have been completely melted
Mammoths were not alive 180 million years ago.
Even if they had been, the ocean floor seems an unlikely habitat for such land loving creatures.
4. There is no predictability with regard to the pole reversals. They do not switch every seven-hundred-thousand years. They do switch, but not with any regularity or pattern that we can discern.
5. Anyone who thinks "boron nitride crystals" are six times harder than diamonds has another think coming. And if there was a substance so hard, you can bet we would have figured out a couple uses for it by now!!! In fact pure hexagonal boron nitride crystals have a hardness on Mohs scale of 1.5, making it one of the softest substances! Also, industry has found many uses for boron nitride.
6. "Theoretically" things get weaker under heat and pressure, not stronger!
7. The mantle is not a liquid, it behaves more like window glass- it flows over very long periods. This, as well as the fact that the outer core is liguid is liquid and the inner core is solid, is known from seismic studies.
8. Plates move at a rate similar to the rate that your fingernails grow. Therefore, if you were watching converging plates, you probably would not be able to discern them closing.

I am willing to overlook one or two impossibilities, but it is irresponsible of the writer to throw out so many things as fact, especially when they are not necessary to the plot. Also, a difference between this book and many other science fiction books that ask you to believe something which is impossible, is that those books tend to take place in the future, another dimension or are more obviously based completely in fiction. Reader beware: Don't believe what you read.