Customer Reviews

Cusp

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

I expected to enjoy this book. It had glowing dust-jacket blurbs by first-rate authors, excellent cover art, and an interesting premise. Plus, I'm a huge fan of hard SF, and I own almost everything that Vernor Vinge, Charles Stross and Greg Egan have ever written. But this book, unfortunately, was a total disaster.

Metzger's space opera is dragged down by poor craftsmanship. His choice of terminology is often awkward; for example, he refers to heavily-modified cyborgs as "ultra-Tools" without the slightest sense of irony. His exotic alien technology comes across as so much Star Trek technobabble--there's a different superpower in every chapter, but without the redeeming campiness of E.E. Smith's Lensmen. And Metzger never gets enough mileage out of his admittedly clever ideas. He'll introduce something exotic enough to test any writer's skill, explore it sloppily and unoriginally for two pages, and then allow it to drop into the background.

Metzger's characters, though, deserve special opprobrium. First, there's just too darn many--the general, the hard-boiled cop with enhanced reflexes, the talking dinosaur, the software reincarnation of Bill Gates, the father and daughter with genetically-engineered nervous systems, and the "Post Point" transhuman who taps Zero Point energy. Even worse, though, is the failure of these characters to live up to the undemanding standards of space opera. Space opera, like any adventure story, works fine with archetypal characters, but Metzger can't even write a convincing hard-boiled cop. And when Metzger's most humane character wipes out North America with a solar flare, she agonizes for less than a paragraph before complimenting herself on her problem-solving skills.

Last night, with ten pages to go and the fate of the planet hanging in the balance, I put down Cusp and went to sleep.

I quite enjoy SF in general, including the hard stuff. But this was hard in a different way -- hard to make out what the heck was going on. Seemed like Metzger had lots and lots of coffee before writing this one, and couldn't bear to let any idea, no matter how zany, slip away. It was entertaining, but only because I borrowed it from somebody and didn't have to be mad about the money I paid for it. Head to Brin, Benford, or Niven for hard SF... avoid this one.

I love hard sci-fi , especially stories with grandiose ambitions. However, here the authors ambitions, although grandiose, were not translated into effective writing. Simply put, I never understood what was going on in this book. The author jumps around and never provides any backdrop information. He uses many of his own terms but never explains them. He keeps referring to the "Swirl" the "Void" amd "Tools", but after 400 pages I still dont know what they are. I was very disappointed by this book. I basically was scratching my head the whole time asking myself "what the hell is going on"? I contrast this type of writing with that of my favorite sci-fi author Robert Sawyer, whose plots are always perfectly clear, and stories are totally coherent.

The dull and repetetive style of this book might have been forgiveable if it had come together in any sort of satisfying way at the end. Metzger invokes far too much ultra-tech magic along the way to allow any suspense or speculation about the outcome.

What makes the fantastic ideas and technologies presented even less satisfying is the fact that they're not held together in any sort of consistent way. For example, the reader is asked to accept that beings capable of reducing living creatures to mere data would choose to then transport the broken-down molecules of those creatures all the way to another star system to be reconstituted rather than transporting (or transmitting) only the data.

Technology not bound by the constraints of the laws of physics - or at least a set of believable rules - is just magic. Attributing it to zero-point energy or quantum mechanical effects beyond our understanding doesn't change that. It's this aspect of the book that moves it out of the realm of hard science fiction and in to that of fantasy.

Metzger pays close attention to many technical details - orbital mechanics and thermodynamics in particular - but then chooses to paint over the difficult spots with references to advanced nanotechnology (with only one convenient appearance in the book), vaguely-explained cyberpunk-style neural augmentation, and quasi-mystical physics. The result is a slow slog through a series of core ideas, some more interesting than others, connected by one deus ex machina after another.

There are so many ideas in this book that you almost need a road map. The basic problem -- how to save the earth as the sun begins to act strangely and giant rings appear on the earth -- which will apparently propel the earth to a new star system. From there, we get to plots that are 65 million years old, quantum manipulation, teams of lemurs and dinosaurs in flying astroids, debates on free will -- you name it, it is in this book. The love interest? The love between family members and friends. This is really a great, challenging book. If you like hard science fiction, then read it.

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CUSP was a slog from the start (though a fine sleep-aid!). Metzger manages to make Big SF Events! boring, and his characters are only slightly more realistic than Bob Forward's. Plus I don't care a rat's ass for any of 'em [note 1].

The book isn't truly awful -- just dull and pointless. I don't recall ever being put to sleep by the End of Civilization as We Know It, chock-full of all sorts of what should be cool space-opera gimmickry --just about all of which falls flat, for me anyway.

Anyway, I'm currently stalled at p. 450 (of 516), after skimming the last hundred pp. or so, hoping to get the thing done with. But you know what? I don't care if I know how the book comes out, or not. Not a good sign, and may be a personal record for Book Abandoned Furthest In [note 2]. Sigh.

Pity, since decent hard-SF isn't easy to find. I'm usually pretty tolerant of wooden writing to get my hard-SF fix, but CUSP is just too slow and dumb to work. YMMV.

I did like the part where the Realpolitik General's daughter dies in a failed sky-dive from an (alien nanotech-built, natch) orbital tower -- a deliberate 'death', so her brains could be scooped out & supercharged with Magic BrainBoost neurostuff, and she could become a posthuman CUSP goddess-figure, indistinguishable from (but more poorly-written than) your extruded Big Magic fantasy superheroine. The "Big Dive" plot device seems utterly pointless to me, but was, I dunno, sort of like watching somebody's parked car, when they forgot to set the brake, start to roll down a hill. Horrified fascination.

I read PICOVERSE, his first, earlier this year, and found it pretty poorly-written, but energetic and (mostly) entertaining: "B-". Four months later, I've basically forgotten all of it. Looking through the reviews I saved, I find this one, by Randy Meek here at Amazon: "Well, I'm not going to be all coy and stuff. Robert Metzger's science fiction novel Picoverse is wretched and vile... Various folks are almost literally ripping off masks and saying, "Ah, you thought I was Werner von Braun, but really I am a death-droid from the Conquernaut Galaxy!" Heh. Memo to self: read more of Meek's reviews!

Happy reading--
Pete Tillman

Note 1: -- that's not counting the ones I actively dislike, such as the General.

Note 2: I'm still stalled at p.450, a month later, and the book is getting awfully dusty, sitting on the office windowsill....

The same information was rendered in the same way so many times, especially in the last third of the book, that I had to guess that Metzger had been tasked to come up with X number of words, so he just kept repeating himself until he had them. Worse, the publisher accepted an obviously rushed attempt without any editing. The book is full of unatributed dialogue and bad grammar. Maybe the editor slept through most of it.

Metzger started with a good idea, including some interesting science. Then he treated both the science and the characters as if he were writing a fantasy. Most of the plot twists were no better than having a fairy suddenly appear and cast a spell. If Metzger had tightened it, if the editor had edited, if, if, if.

It a sorry excuse for a book that should have been so much better.

This is my first "hard" sci-fi book. After not reading sci-fi for 20 years, I rediscovered it with Robert Charles Wilson (highly recommended) and thought I would branch out a bit. Well, there are 2 kinds of sci-fi writers. Those whom use the characters to get to the science and those whom use the science to get to the characters. Mr. Metzger is the latter. Invariably the latter fail to engage you emotionally or ultimately psychologically. Strictly intellectual writing bores me. This book is heavy on intellect and light on emotional insight. Interesting but boring.....

This is a hard sci fi book. The concepts presented from the thruster ring attached to the earth to the new world social structure and the strange brain transplanting are all good and fun sci fi ideas. Unfortuantely, Metzger fails to uses them not as tools to tell a story. Instead they seem to be the point of the story.

Orson Scott Card wrote in an essay that what makes science fiction one of the great literary frontiers is that you can bend all the rules, make fantastic worlds, and then throw humans into it and see what evolves. Metzger got the first part of it. He built an different kind of world. Unfortunately he didn't use it for anything. Other than telling a very bizzare stor; a story which lacks ANY human connection and any underlying theme. Despite how much the world changes in this novel, the characters don't seem to at all.

The second half of the book seems to try to up the ante by adding even more obscurity. The talking dinosaur was the point where this book broke and pretty much gave up hope. From then on, with no expectations for the book, I was no longer let down, but no recovery was made either.

Rarely do I feel at the end of a book as though my time could have been better spent doing anything else. Reading this book, unfortunately, is one of those experiences. I finished this book as a child finishes his brocoli: only so that I could move on to better things. This book is not awful, but it is not good.

This is not the worst book I've ever read, but it's the worst I've read this year: I read four or five a week and write this on 30 December. The writing is fairly bad. Enamored of misplaced sentence modifiers, the prose reads like it was written by someone who reads a lot but doesn't pay much attention to the structure of what was written.

I agree with an earlier reviewer that one needs to be willing to forgive a lot when reading science fiction. Happily, Metzger here does not share the necessary-to-forgive ultraconservative political views of many of the people he imitates (e.g., Niven), but, alas, that positive point does not compensate for the lack of thinking evident here.

This is science fiction insomuch as it covers many of the ideas common in science fiction (extraterrestrial travel, artificial intelligence, and the like), but it is science fiction per se just as "Aida" is a work of Egyptian history.

This would probably make a good comic book along the lines of the 1960s/1970s Marvel stuff: there are a lot of descriptions of scenes that would be fun to draw, and explanation never played a big part in those works. You'll find no explanations of the technology/phenomena here and only the most cursory motive attributions applied to the characters. (One would say almost obligatory attributions, insofar as such explanations have become inextricably intertwined with descriptions of said stock characters. Among other examples, the required representative of the military-industrial complex, Sutherland, is outstanding.)

Metzger's devices for filling in background are extraordinarily tiresome. Characters (e.g., the police officers) spend pages just after having been introduced discussing their own backgrounds for no reason relevant to the plot or (in another scene) one character actually reads aloud a dossier compiled on another character to that character.

What parts of this book I could get through I read while waiting for a fast food hamburger to be made and served, while waiting for a bus, and so forth. It was better than doing nothing at such times, but once I got home I tossed the book on the "get rid of" pile. It'll be on the free shelf at my local library soon, with my bookmark still two-thirds of the way through.

One final point: I guess this book is safe from spoiler reviews: it's hard to imagine anyone being interested enough to care about not being able to read to the end.