Customer Reviews

The Crucible of Time

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2 star:		(1)
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I had finished reading Dangerous Visions : The 35th Anniversary Edition and Year's Best SF 5 -- lots of short stories. I wanted a novel, which would last a while, where I could get more into the characters and the situations. So I chose the Brunner.

This is more a series of novellas. Each chapter ("Part" in the contents) covers a period in the planet's history. Each is very close to 60 pages long, about 20,000 words. This ticked me off a little, at first. I wanted a novel, not six linked novellas. Then after about the third chapter I realized Brunner had only three or four characters which appeared and reappeared in each, with a new name. So I felt better.

There is always a main protagonist who is young; there are two groups of investigators -- seamen, astronomers, rocketry scientists -- all adults but at odds over a procedure or technique or idea. Through the efforts of the young person, the situation is resolved and the race makes progress.

In this way we learn of the cosmic danger faced by their world, of their ice age, of their discovery of radio-activity, of their space program. After a short while, the world becomes the main character and its fate provides the tension.

Walter Alvarez T. Rex and the Crater of Doom developed the asteroid theory in 1980. Brunner wrote "Crucible..." in 1982 and uses it to drive the plot. In 1977 when I became an accredited meteorologist, temperatures were cooling and we wondered if another ice age were on the way. Brunner must have absorbed this idea, too.

In this way the book is an interesting look at the question "What if?" or "If this goes on..."

The writing is very good; uses an inventive vocabulary. The characters are sympathetic and their situations are interesting. One has to extrapolate a bit to bring to human application -- they are aliens -- and this might have diminished the book's popularity. Nontheless it is a good read and I recommend it. It has held up. Oh, you should also find a copy of Dangerous Visions, too. Lots of good stuff in there.

Crucible of Time is a series of six novella length stories, each set in a different historical time period with new characters, involving an alien society as their technology advances against looming extinction. Their planet is in a debris heavy region of space, and massive climate changes and meteor impacts keep happening in the stories. This much is exciting.

What made me dislike the novel is the lack of descriptions. Brunner never describes his aliens. We know they have a mantle, reproduce by budding, use pheromones for emotional communication, and have claws. They also are described as a 'symbiosis.' Without enough food they literally lose their minds as their bodies react into a more primitive state. Are they lobsters, insects, carnivorous plants, or oversized amoebas? I still don't know after reading the book. (And don't even get me started on the other mystery native creatures -- carnifangs, briqs, braqs, porps, junqs, etc..)

Half of the chapters were good despite not knowing what 'people' looked like, and the others were boring. Apparently office politics is commonplace in alien societies. If you like alternate history, imagined psychology, and don't mind making your own mental pictures of weird aliens, you'll like the book. If you are expecting a solid science fiction story involving any other science but biology, you won't like it. Technology levels in this book are very primitive. The novel is more about alien culture than anything else (and hard to get into without good physical descriptions).

This is easily one of my favorite scifi novels of all time. The vast time period that this story spans and the wonderful love of discovery that takes place by the loveable creatures on this planet is awe inspiring.

I loved the descriptions of the creatures, their wonderlust, the amazing descriptions of the different time periods, the excellent descriptions of the cultures, the seafaring people, the ones who lived on the land, etc.

The amount of background work that Mr. Brunner had to do to flesh out these creatures, the cultures, etc in this story is nothing less than stunning. What a great thing to do to make the story sound so believeable - albeit with creatures that are vastly different than us.

I really can't say enough about the marvelous feelings this story invoked in me about the danger of religion, the importance of spreading knowledge, and the delight I felt about the long periods of time between the major sections of the story as their civilization progressed.

Thank you, Mr Brunner for this story. Altho it was written 25 years ago and I missed it for that entire quarter century, at least I finally found his awesome tale! My only regret is that Mr. Brunner passed on over a decade ago and I can't contact him to tell him directly.

On another world very much like ours, people deal with various problems in several distinct ages. The characters are genuinely likeable and even heroic. You kind of forget they're bugs, mostly. There is almost a renaissance flavor to one of the periods. Well crafted in the true spirit of a great story. One of my all time favorites.

I read this novel shortly after it was published and to this day it remains one of the most memorable SF stories I've ever read. It's also one of those books that I appreciate more each time I return to it, not because the book changes, but because I have learned more and so am in a better position to appreciate some of the incredibly smart things Brunner does in this novel. The story is told from the perspective of a world of intelligent aliens as they reach out to discover the universe in which they live. They have to do that in ways that are very different from our own history in details (for example, they live under water where access to the night sky is limited, which puts a crimp in early astronomy), but very similar in the abstract. The similarities arise for the simple reason that the universe in which they live is THE universe. The message here is deep and subtle and important: reality is what it is, and no matter what kind of body you have, no matter what specific environmental niche you occupy, if you are smart enough to wonder about the world you live in, and clever enough to discover ways to ask your questions well, you will discover the same immutable facts about the nature of things. Brunner shows this without ever giving a lecture or explicitly making the point. In my opinion it's a story telling tour de force that really puts the science solidly in the center of science fiction.

from the back cover of the of the Del Rey July 1984 paperback edition
Cover art by Don Dixon
Life had become too interesting on one world crawling across the rubble-strewn arm of a spiral galaxy, for as the system moved it swept up cosmic dust and debris. Ice ages and periods of tropical warmth followed one another very quickly. Meteors large and small fell constantly. Yesterday's fabled culture might be tomorrow's interesting hole in the ground.
But society had always endured. Many thought it always would. Only the brightest scientists admitted that to survive, the race would have to abandon the planet. And to do that they'd have to invent spacecraft...

I can live with stories about bug people, but it was like history going on and on and on and never getting anywhere very interesting. I finished it hoping that it would improve towards the end, but it didn't