Customer Reviews

Dark as Day

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The sequel to Cold as Ice, Sheffield brings back one who is becoming one of the great characters of science fiction, Rustum "Bat" Battachariya, along with a whole host of new characters. (He likely drew Bat's Puzzle Network handle, "Megachirops," from "chiropter", a noun meaning any mammal of the order Chiroptera, comprising the bats. Weighing in at 300 kilos or thereabouts, he definitely is "mega.") Two of the new characters, Janeed Jannex, an orphan who has looked after her self-adopted "brother" (also an orphan) for almost her entire life, and Paul Marr, First Mate on the Outer System Line (OSL) Achilles, come together in a manner distinctly reminiscent of Ann Darrow (Fay Wray) and First Mate Jack Driscoll (Bruce Cabot) of the original, 1933 version of the movie King Kong.
While not without blemishes (such as putting the action a mere 95 years from now, much too soon for the technology and colonization described in the book to take place -- why, oh why, do sci fi authors insist on doing this?), the book is nonetheless brilliant in scope and effectively weaves together several plots lines and even a couple of subplots. The gist of the story is how events slowly, but inexorably bring together a handful of people (well, maybe a couple of handfuls) from disparate walks of life and different corners of the Solar System to confront a danger from the past that threatens all life in the Solar System, human and otherwise. Along the way Sheffield plays out storylines that held my interest completely, never wanting to put the book down. Heck, anyone who can weave in the use of statistical mechanics as part of analytical prediction theory and keep my interest in the process...well, Sheffield is a master storyteller! He even throws in some "SETI Cryptanalysis 101" for good measure. He is fast carving out his place in the Sci Fi Hall of Fame. A resounding 5 stars, along with a wish that a third sequel, to include the Bat, is in the offing. (And with the Seine, a Solar System-wide computer super network being introduced here, there definitely is hope for a sequel!)

After reading Cold as Ice I was disappointed by this book. Dark as Day is longer and had more characters, which is not necessarily a good thing. Most of the characters are not fully developed or introduced and then dropped along the way. The parallel storylines do converge at the end, but it is incomplete and sloppy.

The glue that holds the book together is the Great Bat. In all my literary tours of the universe I have never encountered a character like him. He prefers to be totally alone to think and study and solve puzzles. He does not wash, he does not dress, he does not travel; he eats and he thinks. Facinating. It is The Bat who finds the clues in the historic documents and puts everything together. Therefore, it is not until you get to the chapters featuring The Bat that the story gets exciting.

Science fiction is supposed to pose some interesting concepts for better living through technology and this book is no exception. There are people with enhanced bodies who stay forever young and healthly, but cannot reproduce. There is the predictive model that indicates all life in the Solar System will cease to exist unless the modifying variable is identified and controlled. There is the alien transmission that no one is able to decode that could be the variable. Each of these would make an exciting story, but they are not fully developed or explored. The story is ultimately about The Bat, his interaction with three computer systems, and his brilliant ability to think through complex problems that others cannot. If you are a fan of The Bat from other Sheffield novels, this is the book for you and I would rate it 4 stars. If The Bat does not do it for you, this is a pleasant read, but nothing to get excited about. No violence, some sexual descriptions, romance, some profanity.

Three decades have passed since the Great War left mankind on the brink of extinction. The devastating twenty-first century is a period of initial greatness throughout the solar system that turned deadly with weapons of mass destruction seemingly in use everywhere especially the biological ones on earth. Now that the century nears its end, humanity seems to have begun recovering especially in the Jupiter-Saturn region, but much more gradually on Earth where the Southern Hemisphere is starting to recuperate.

In 2097 on the moon Ganymede, Alex Ligon, son of a family of trading giants, has rebuilt the "seine" computer network. However, his program predicts humanity will become extinct in less than a hundred years. On the asteroids near Jupiter, SETI researcher Milly Wu believes she has received an alien communication. Rustum "Bat" Battachariya, who collects weapons from the Great War, follows rumors of a doomsday weapon. He consults with Milly and her SETI peers on her findings even as Alex tries to meet with him on a family matter. When Bat learns that earthling Sebastian contains strange nodules inside his head, he wonders what they are and what damage they can cause.

DARK AS DAY, the sequel to COLD AS ICE, is incredibly complex yet brilliantly entertaining as the deep story line traverses the solar system. The plot contains cleverly inspired enigmas and even smarter solutions that work at hyperspeed due to the believable ensemble. Though quite dark, humor eases the tale from going too deep into the abyss. Even with a powerful vivid story line, the authentic feel to characters make Charles Sheffield's cerebral dark futuristic tale a triumph for genre fans.

Harriet Klausner

Those returning to the universe of Sheffield's _Cold As Ice_ and _The Ganymede Club_ will be pleased to find their old friend Bat here. The reclusive, snoopy genius has exiled himself to a moon of Saturn. Unfortunately, his home on Pandora figures in the plans of the ruthless and pushy Ligon family who want to reverse their recent slide from third to tenth in the rankings of richest companies in the solar system.

Reluctantly involved in their plot is Alex Ligon, sort of the black sheep of the family. When not being bullied by his family into running errands -- or auditioning for arranged marriages -- he works for the government rather than Ligon Industries. He's proud of a vast, sophisticated computer model of the entirety of human civilization in the solar system -- until it shows mankind going extinct in less than a century. Bad modelling or a ominous and valid warning?

Meanwhile, young Millie Wu has signed on to work for one half of the Beston brothers -- aka the Bastard and the Ogre, SETI researchers whose obsession about finding alien signals is matched only by their obsession with besting each other. Wu can't quite believe her luck when she seems to have detected a genuine signal.

On Earth, Janeed Jannex and her childhood friend Sebastian Birch decide to emigrate to space, but their recruiters prove to surprisingly be interested in Birch's almost idiot savant fascination with, of all things, clouds.

Those familiar with Sheffield's previous work will expect these plotlines to converge, and, as with _Cold As Ice_, the surprises are less in the sometimes predictable plot twists than the why of events or their scientific explanation. Those who found the ideas of that novel interesting will also appreciate this one. Sheffield gives us a system wide internet, the Seine, that communicates instantaneously via quantum entanglement. There is the mining of methane deposits on the floors of Earth's oceans, and a fairly detailed explanation of how an alien radio signal would be analysed and decoded. Even if Sheffield engages in a bit of handwaving with his explanations of Alex Ligon's computer model, it is still interesting.

Readers new to this series should have no trouble jumping right in with this book, and those who have read the other two novels will find little amplifications of previous plots points -- including Bat's growing collection of weapons from the Great War.

But don't read it until you've also gotten Cold as Ice, and read it. The two are among the very best hard SF books anyone has written. As a bonus, they both also have a mystery for the main characters to solve.

I already miss Charles Sheffield, just because the prospects of more novels featuring the unique "Bat" are remote. Sheffield wrote the very hardest SF (as appropriate for a Ph.D. in physics), but he usually managed to tell a good story as well - something that most of the other physicists who have written SF haven't managed to do. I wish he could have lived and written for another 20 years.

I wish to defend the instantaneous communication system a previous reviewer has maligned. Sheffield quite explicitly states that it works because of quantum entanglement, a perfectly respectable theory which was discussed in Scientific American's special edition last year on cosmology and cosmogony.

If you want to find some good reading, and are willing to accept his (very) rare failures, pick up some of his older novels, many of which were published in Analog before coming into the bookstores.

This is one of the better science fiction novels I've read lately, and one of the better novels, period. The science and the big SF ideas are well done, of course, but the excellent characterization is what sets this novel apart from most SF. Sheffield has crafted characters that range from the naive and delicate, to the most powerful and repulsive.

(There are a few nitpicks. There's some hand-waving done with quantum mechanics to get faster-than-light communication, for example. But, overall, it's such a pleasure to read that I forgave it these slight shortcomings.)

In one of his last novels, Charles Sheffield has written one of his best. _Dark as Day_, the sequel to the entertaining _Cold as Ice_ stars everyone's favorite recluse, grossly overweight puzzle master, The Great Bat, in another life or death race across the solar system.

Sheffield weaves together three or four simulatneous plotlines to present a cohesive and thrilling story of the potential end of the universe. Bat, avid Great War history buff, discovers that an evil scientist created an apocalyptic 'sleeper' virus that may be activated soon. This plotline coupled with a possible first contact with aliens creates a compelling novel that should be included among the year's top SF novels.

Also, from a purely asthetic viewpoint, the packaging for _Dark as Day_ is among the finest I've seen recently. From the superb Vincent Di Fate cover to the attractive designs and fonts throughout the novel, this book is a treat to read. It's said not to judge a book by its cover but in this case you won't go wrong.

Summary: Entertaining and vey well-written story. Believable and compelling characters. Highly recommended.

Thirty years ago, the Belt Wars destroyed much of humanity. Now, humanity is digging its way out of the rubble, building new bases, reclaiming Mars and Earth from the destruction of war, and creating new and promising innovations in science and technology. Researcher Alex Ligon expects the power of the new computer will allow his predictive models to show where humanity is heading. When they tell him that humanity will be eliminated in less than a hundred years, he is shocked. Puzzle master Rustum (Bat) Battachariya thinks that a hundred years is optimistic. The rumored doomsday weapon from the war has never been found. Unless it is, Bat fears that humanity's destruction can come at any moment.

The arrival of a signal from non-human space sends the protagonists together. For Alex, alien intelligence may be the way out of the destruction his models show. For Bat, the alien message is an irresistable puzzle. Yet there are other intelligences at work--both living, dead, and computer. Humanity must survive the coming weeks if it is to have a chance to learn what secrets the alien message holds.

Author Charles Sheffield brings a realistic touch to the science in this science fiction novel. The SETI sequences, in particular, ring true while still being entertaining. His descriptions of the quirky characters who make up the plot is also enjoyable. I would have liked to see the salvation of the human species come from something other than blind luck but otherwise, DARK AS DAY is a powerful and enjoyable page turner.

This Sheffield novel seems rushed at the end and therefore isn't very satisfying, but the journey is a lot of fun. Sheffield creates interesting characters, such as Milly Wu the SETI researcher, the Great Bat the puzzle master, and Alex Ligon a rich boy computer modeler. Then there's Sebastian Birch, who has something wrong with him that, unfortunately, isn't ever fully explained. All set in the plausible (to me) world of the settled outer solar system, principally on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. I was sorry to learn that Sheffield, a theoretical physicist, died in 2002. This book, his last, is a sequel to "Cold As Ice" and the "Ganymede Club." Despite the flaws, I'd happily read a dozen more set in this realm. Alas, it is not to be.

_Dark As Day_ by Charles Sheffield is the third and final volume of his (I believe) unnamed trilogy that began with _Cold As Ice_ and continued with _The Ganymede Club_. An excellent end to a very enjoyable series, the trilogy is only rather loosely connected, united mainly in the setting, which in a manner similar to a series of novels by Ben Bova - in the setting that includes the novels _Mars_, _Saturn_, _Venus_, and _Jupiter_ among others- is set in a future in which humanity is spread throughout the solar system but has not yet traveled beyond it, though humanity is more entrenched and numerous among the various bodies in our solar system than in Bova's series, with millions of humans living on Mars, Ganymede, and Callisto as well as scattered throughout the asteroid belt (a.k.a. the Belt) and in various satellites of Saturn.

Aside from the fact that each later novel takes places further along the history of that universe than the novel that proceeded it, there is one common character, a major one, in these books, an individual by the name of Rustum Battachariya (also known simply as Bat), one of the most colorful, interesting, and distinct characters I have ever read in any science fiction novel. He is a reclusive individual, one mainly interested in profoundly difficult mathematical problems he solved for fun as part of a organization called the Puzzle Network and in collecting relics of the Great War, a massive conflict about thirty years ago that was system wide, fought on Earth, Mars, and the Belt and one that killed billions.

As in the previous two novels, despite his dislike for publicity (except within the confines of the Puzzle Network) and for spending any quality, face-to-face time with any human being in the flesh, Bat was an integral character in solving the main problem in the book. In this case the problem is a multipart one, one that ended up somehow involving such diverse threads as the opening up of a very powerful system-wide internet of sorts called the Seine, the bizarre results from a highly sophisticated predictive model designed by one Alex Ligon, one that showed humanity going extinct within a century, the Bat's efforts to track down a major weapons designer that went missing during the Great War, the weird mental abilities of a boy from Earth, Sebastian Birch, who had bizarre and apparently non-reactive microscopic objects in his body and had the almost idiot savant talent of predicting weather patterns on distant planets with little data, intrigue within Alex's family, the Ligon family, in trying to gain a lease on a small moon named Pandora (one leased by the very reclusive Bat), and the apparent discovery of extraterrestrial signals by Milly Wu, working at one of two competing SETI facilities near Jupiter. There is a lot going on but the plots do tie together very well in the end and make for a very compelling book. Sheffield did a fantastic job with this novel, the characters are extremely well drawn and very distinct, the science in this science fiction seemed top notch, and it is just a great story. I think that definitely it is the best of the three novels and one that could very easily be read as a stand-alone book.