Customer Reviews

Diving into the Wreck

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Diving Into the Wreck is like something out of the Golden Age of Sci-Fi as it feels like a timeless tale in the far future, which is an amazing irresistible and speedy read. The book is broken into 3 interlocking stories that would have acted well on their own in novella form, but together form a rich universe and history. It is a very personal book that ends up being quite a bit more than you expect. The stories get bigger and bigger with the telling until you reach a somewhat intense culmination.

Diving is very reminiscent of Pohl's Gateway or possible placed in something close to the Babylon 5 universe. The stories are told from Boss's view in an almost journal like fashion. She is not some hero archetype, but a loner who only has human interactions when she deems it necessarily and operates everything she does in a business-like fashion. At first this can make her seem cold, but she has a lot more layers that come through. Boss makes her living traveling through space looking for wrecked space ships, which she hopes can be plundered for treasure, sold, salvaged, or possibly toured with inexperienced divers out for a thrill. Think of her job as an expert scuba diver, but only in space and with a lot more risk.

Diving Into the Wreck is easy on the science for those who don't like amazing long scientific explanations to go along with the story. But Rusch's science is well enough explained to suit the story's purpose. It is her universe's history and character building that you'll be drawn to. The crux of the story surrounds Boss's discovery of mysterious ancient vessel that may have lost technology that could change everything in her sector of the universe. She mounts an expedition of sorts into the vessel with a trusted group of divers and odd things happen. From there we also encounter an eerie space station where people have been disappearing for years.

Perfectly paced and immensely readable Diving Into the Wreck will satisfy even the most jaded of Sci-Fi reader. If I had any complaints it would only be that it was over too soon and left me for wanting more out of Boss and her cadre of divers. I give Diving Into the Wreck 8 out of 10 Hats. I plan on reading more Rusch and have already ordered a copy of The Disappeared, which is book one in The Retrieval Artist Series a Mystery Sci-Fi series. Unfortunately, The Disappeared is out of print, but used copies are easily had on amazon. Rusch also mentioned on her blog another Diving Universe book is possible. I sure hope it happens as there is at least one more major mission waiting for Boss.

I love the Retrieval Artist series but sadly this isn't half as good. I didn't engage with the characters very much (though the author was ruthlessly killing them off) and didn't care for the situation much either. I think Rusch has an amazing capacity to create new and alien cultures, but it felt squandered here - the characters were all too familiar, and the situation, despite the unnerving Room of Lost Souls, was also too ordinary. A misfire

I found DIVING INTO THE WRECK to be a compulsively readable novel. Taking place in the very, very distant future, the main character makes her living finding ancient wrecked spaceships and space stations, studying them for historical reasons, and acquiring "treasure," if it applies. She also will take tourists out to safer wrecks. The work is similar to deep sea diving with its claustrophobia, dangers, and zero margins for error. When she discovers a Dignity Vessel, thousands of years old, in a part of space it has no business being, she assembles a crew and begins the adventure. But things go horribly awry as she encounters technology that could turn the politics of the galaxy on its head--extremely deadly technology. The novel is engrossing, the character interesting, the SF aspects intriguing and very well written. The story is very atmospheric and Rusch applies a nice hard SF mode to the technology, making the dangers and risks very clear to the reader. I ripped through it. Where I started to come apart was toward the end when, for a variety of reasons I won't spoil here, the main character decides to go about destroying the technology. Although her motivations are clear, never once is the word "treason" uttered, although it appears that's what she and her crew are planning to do, and the repercussions of their actions seem downplayed. And I think you could argue that the politics surrounding it are probably understated as well. But within the context of this diverting novel those are fairly mild complaints and I wouldn't hesitate to buy and read any follow-up Rusch might write.

Diving Into The Wreck is a book that caught my attention because of the title, cover and blurb. It sounded like something that would be right up my street and promised enough to make me wonder how and where the story would go. Although it starts off in a fairly predictable fashion (but enjoyable none-the-less), Diving Into The Wreck turned into a very entertaining and page turning read.

The story is split into three sections - the first is the finding and diving of the mysterious wreck, while the second and third follow up on the implications and information found during the first part. If it sounds like I am being deliberately vague it's because I am - going into too much detail on anything past the first section will give some of the game away and this is a story that deserves being read fresh. I will say this about the book - it's an extremely well written and thoroughly engrossing novel with some vivid descriptions while raising some very believable and serious questions.

What is especially impressive about Diving Into The Wreck is that Rusch has written it entirely in the first person. This means that what Boss knows, you know. This is a good way to put the reader into the action and allow you to get sucked into the situation. Boss is a character that is identifiable with some aspects of herpersonality (for instance, her privacy) and has values that are fairly straight forward, all going to give us a solid central character. The supporting cast are also introduced and fleshed out as much as the situation needs. This especially helped in keeping the pace of the novel flowing nicely without getting bogged down.

Despite how much I enjoyed the novel I had one gripe that I just couldn't shake when I finished - the ending. It's not that it isn't suited, but to me it felt as if it went against the grain of the story. However, despite this I came away from Diving Into The Wreck satisfied and pleased with the overall story. If any sequels where released (and there is plenty of scope) I would snatch them up without a second thought. I'll also be making it my business to check out more work byRusch.

The Good.
This story really captures the claustrophobia and danger of going into a wreak. It's thrilling, and really creepy in places. What the lost technology does to people sent shivers down my spine and it only gets worse as they explain it. The author also doesn't make the mistake of explaining to much leaving a lot mysterious.

The Average.
The characters tend to be sketches. No one really felt three dimensional and I didn't really adore any of them but I was still sad when some of them died.

The Bad.
The author Did Not Do the Research, pretty much every time they go into some description about space it's wrong. The book states that space is cold, it acts like space is viscous, the characters are nervous about suit punctures when they're wearing mechanical counterpressure suits (which don't puncture, ok, I'm a wonk) the characters seem to be flying their ships visually even in deep space (close to the wreak I can understand) at one point the main character states how she hates when the divers enter the wreak for the first time and they lose communication, at which point I was wondering why they'd never heard of fiber-optic cables. It goes on.

It kept throwing me out of the novel.

The author is a good writer but I found this story lacking. I wanted to know more about the Stealth Tech the derelict ship had. Nothing about the ship was really described, besides the initial breach of the hull. And there was virtually no exploring of the ship, which was strange because that's what I thought the story would be about but it wasn't. It was about the main character and her father, a government scientist and their past and the fact that the stealth tech killed a bunch of innocent military people and the main character wanted to destroy the tech. The book was pretty boring. I wanted them to explore the ship, maybe find some dark secret about ancient earth or something. Nothing like that here. I was really disappointed. The cover is cool though, looks like Kate from lost.

This entire book left me muttering "why are we being *told* this? Why can't we *see* them do it?"

The book feels like the last two short stories from a collection of five; as though we'd spent a lot of time learning who these characters were, and what they did, and the experiences they'd had that informed their later behavior. Instead, we're...*told* all that stuff. We're *told* that the main character has a long history, we're *told* about the other character's experiences, we're *told* what Wreck Diving is and how it's done. I like the notion of conflating contemporary deep-sea wreck divers with spacesuited treasure-hunters investigating derelict ships in the far future...but the author *tells* us that's what they do, presenting it as an established fact. We're shown a character at the end of her career, and we're *told* about all the interesting and fascinating things that she's done. The only ones we actually *see* are the last two, when it all goes off the rails.

Indeed, that's the key disappointment for me. The characters in the book are all horrified at what they find in the wreck; it's presented as new and unique. But to the *reader*, well, we just walked in. *Everything* is new and unique to us; why should one more bit of mystery be more exciting than another? I felt like I needed more time to understand the characters and their world before having it all turned upside-down.

I enjoyed reading the book, but in the end I did not feel it was worth $10. I feel that $4 or $5 would better represent the length and quality of the experience.

Diving into the Wreck is a short but excellent science fiction novel by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, who has also written extensively in fantasy, mystery and romance, and is the former editor of the prestigious Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

The main character of Diving into the Wreck, who goes by the name "Boss," is a specialist in the exploration of derelict space ships. Accompanied by a team of specialists, she goes into these abandoned vessels, in a process that is very similar to deep sea diving with all its careful preparation and inherent dangers. When Boss discovers a 5000 year old Earth ship that couldn't possibly be in the sector where she found it, a string of events is set in motion that leads back to some of her earliest memories, and will possibly have huge implications.

Boss is an extremely interesting character. She's a control freak (as evidenced by her nickname) and more than a little obsessed with privacy (see her ship's name, "Nobody's Business"). She's extremely good at what she does, and you quickly get the idea that being capable is more important to her than being liked. The traumatic childhood event that's described in the prologue still affects her every day. At first it seems disconnected from the book, but it comes back as the driving force of the entire novel.

Diving into the Wreck is told from a tight first person perspective, so everything -- including Boss herself -- is seen through Boss's eyes. As a result, some shocking events are at first described in her very cold-sounding, matter-of-fact tone -- and only later we find out how strongly she was affected by them.

The novel is affected in other ways by this choice of narrator and perspective. Aside from the bare-bones prose style, we also only get the most basic information about the political set-up of the novel's universe, which involves a dominant Terran empire and a smaller breakaway group of independent planets, with the story firmly set on the side of that alliance of independent planets. After all, exposition is not on Boss's mind: this is her story, and Diving into the Wreck is more about Boss and her psychological growth than about the SF universe it inhabits.

Much like Adrienne Rich's poem of the same name, Diving into the Wreck uses diving as a metaphor for self-exploration and self-discovery. This may be a very personal interpretation, but the first person, present tense narrator frequently gave me the impression that the main character was narrating the events of the book under some form of therapeutic hypnosis, eyes closed, voice monotone, completely immersed in the experience.

However, this isn't just a psychological novel without SF underpinnings. Kristine Kathryn Rusch throws in enough world-building details to give the reader a basic idea of the political and historical background of her SF universe. There are a few intriguing chapters set on a military research planet that would probably merit an entire novel. I couldn't help thinking that someone like Peter F. Hamilton would have squeezed several thousand pages out of this universe. Not that this necessarily would result in a better work, but to be honest, I wanted more!

One issue I had with the novel: the side characters who accompany Boss on her dives are, for the most part, not very well defined. A few of them gain depth as the story progresses, but most are interchangeable figurines -- which, possibly, they were in Boss's eyes, too.

At just under 250 pages, divided into short chapters, Diving into the Wreck is a fast and entertaining read that starts off as a deceptively straightforward story about shipwreck retrieval but quickly reveals additional psychological, political and ethical layers. This is one of those rare SF novels I'd recommend to people who usually don't read the genre: it's easily recognizable as science fiction, but it does much more with standard elements of the genre than you'd initially expect. Recommended.

Totally like one of the Golden Age science fiction tales. A set of three interwoven novellas that give the reader a number of ideas to think about. Set in the far future when science has lost many of the inventions of the past, the novellas deal with the attempt to recover stealth technology invented in the far past.

Characters are killed, roles are examined and a new type of science fiction "job" is created; diving for value in space wrecks.

Extremely interesting; great characterizations, and filled with points to ponder. I enjoyed it and am now looking forward to reading more books by the author.

Looking at the cover, I expected Diving into the Wreck to be a rollicking space opera novel by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Instead, the novel (actually a collection of three blended novellas) is a solid science fiction read that examines the consequences of dangerous technology as well as the very real danger of diving wrecks in space.

Once I dialed back my expectations regarding the book's adventure quotient versus thinking plotting, I enjoyed the atmosphere Rusch brings to the story. I imagined the scenes of getting into and out of the wrecks with ease, and where space opera would have been a run-and-gun scenario, Rusch leavens the action with all the nervous tension of diving underwater. Space and the bottom of the sea are both void of water, both just as alien for human, and Rusch never lets her readers forget that.

I also enjoyed the quirky cast of characters she's assembled on the pages. Just like ancient mariners, her crew each has their own lucky charm for diving, and their own preparations for venturing into unknown spaceships that might be filled with traps or just dangers created from becoming obsolete. Since the story consists of three interwoven novellas, the characters can go away and come back, and do, which makes for a more real feeling about the book.

Rusch's prose makes reading incredibly easy, and the philosophical questions she brings up - as well as the world she exposes for us - lulls the reader in. Although the danger isn't exactly in-your-face, it never truly leaves the page either. When the two people die while on a dive inside a Dignity Vessel everyone knew they weren't supposed to dive, I knew that not everyone was going to walk away safely from this one. There were going to be repercussions for me as a reader.

I do wish I'd gotten to know more about the stealth tech, though. The science part of the story, as well as the world of antiquity it hails from, is hinted at in rather broad strokes. As I read, I kept hoping I'd know and understand more, but in reality if something is that far beyond a person's knowledge, you just wouldn't know those things.

The gravity of "Boss," that's all she's ever called in the novel, and her decisions are heavy throughout, so she felt real to me. Her pain and her confusion over her mother's death and her father's betrayals are realistic.

Diving into the Wreck isn't a light read because there's a lot to think about regarding science and what we should do about it if we ever run up against something far advanced from what we can understand. But mostly I'm going to remember the claustrophobic feeling the author paints on the pages while her characters were inside derelicts mired in outer space.