Customer Reviews

Eighty-Minute Hour: A Space Opera

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Britain nuked right under.

They weren't the only ones either, plenty of other places copped it, Australian included. This book was set at the end of the 20th century, and with this level of disaster there certainly seemed to be a lot of improbable technology running around for the time period, from holograms, cyborgs, micronauts, people on other planets, just to name a few. Maybe even a bit of mind control. Whackiness of stuff, and whackiness of language.



In other words, this book is really not very good.

Now, this is one of the weirdest novels I have read. It builds on the same kind of scenario as Frankenstein Unbound i.e. time slips as a result of nuclear war. But this story in infinitely more complex. There are I think five or six parallel stories with different character that only in the very end are connected to each other (think about that, I guess about ten main characters equally important, and you have to read six or seven chapters to find out what happened when the last chapter ended).It is written as a kind of musical comedy, I kid you not, the character repeatedly break out in song! Since time is acting up, there is no simple way to tell the story (like chronological order) so it does get confusing at times.The theme of the book could be said to be a kind of mystery that asks who actually rules the world. It seems that the world is run by computers (the Zeitgeist people should read this), but who runs the computers?

It is also at times almost Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy-level silly, though not as funny IMO. And incredibly thought provoking as well. Aldiss in all his books is fond of alluding to different works of literature etc, but here it at times get absurd (I guess it is because the narrator is far from a neutral observer): I found a joke that you would only get if you are fairly well versed in liturgical terminology.

It does kind of come together in the end, but at times it does feel like a bit too much. So, high marks for ambition, slightly less so for execution. But it is well worth the read.

I usually finish any book I read, but this one did not entertain me; it did not interest me in the characters, setting, nor concepts. I'm surprised it's still in print, since it was first published in 1974 and doesn't seem to be worth reading after 25 pages.