The Hope [Hardcover]

James Lovegrove (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 25, 1990

"The Hope" was a ship - five miles long, and two miles wide and one mile high - the crowning achievement of the industrial era. Now it is a dream turned rancid. She has become an oceangoing ark for her motley cargo of violent lives and vicious passions. This is the author's first novel.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

James Lovegrove is in his late thirties. He has been identified as one of the most talented of the current crop of British genre writers by numerous critics. His novel DAYS was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. He is married and lives in Devon. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Macmillan (January 25, 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0333512146
• ISBN-13: 978-0333512142
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,096,755 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars White Wolf's nasty habit, January 14, 2000

By 

D.C. (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Hope (Paperback)

this is an enjoyable little book. loosely connected sketches that intertwine in delightful ways, it is a light and breezy read. which is part of its charm and also its problem. nothing wrong with the work, no, but with the way it's been marketed. white wolf publishing's habit is to take decent material and slap the 'cutting edge horror' subgenre label onto it with nary a thought to its actual contents. this is fantasy. sometimes dark. more often than not ... not. but enough of white wolf's typically pretentious fumbles. this one is worth the effort to find it.

while the sense of scale is never really an issue to the stories at large (a five by two by one mile seafaring vessel? even using only 3000 vertical feet, with levels each a generous 10 feet high, you're looking at 300 decks each about 10 miles square--that's some 3000 square miles of habitable surface area, folks; this horrifically huge living area just never comes across and the story comes off instead as taking place on nothing larger than your average liner, not an oceangoing world of steel) , the writing is sharp and the dialogue is natural and the characters are well-observed.

this is a true gothic. decadence and decay reflected in the decline of the ship and of the society she contains, this is one dark and stormy night journey you'll likely remember if for no other reason than that the premise itself is just plain strange and not just a little original.

definetly worth the price of admission.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Excellent concept, not sure about the execution, April 24, 2004

By 

jeb (Melbourne, Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hope (Gollancz Sf S.) (Paperback)

The idea of The Hope - an eerie, seemingly abandoned cruise ship with all those on board left to fend for themselves - is an excellent idea. The way the story has been told (through a series of what could easily be short stories which stand up well on their own) has also been written a lot better than similar attempts at this style of writing.

It certainly is a very gothic tale, although I'm not sure I could call it horror. Regrettably, the author seems to get a little confused as to the message he's conveying - is it a fable about society's class structure? Every time I thought I understood where he was going, he twisted it around or it became a little nonsensical. Given the story's ending, I'm not sure that was his intention.

Parts of this novel quite annoyed me - I'm no prude, but there were some totally arbitrary points in this book which were included simply to shock or disgust, without adding anything to the story whatsoever. Almost felt like the author was pressured to add them in at the insistence of his editor to turn it into "horror" ;-)

All in all - great if you're into gothic, eerie, dark atmospheric stories. Lovegrove has written a much better novel which you'll like if you're into the concept of the Hope - check his book called "Days".

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Voyage of the damned, April 18, 2003

By 

bonsai chicken (United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Hope (Paperback)

The Hope is a massive ocean liner the size of a small city, that was funded by an eccentric philanthropist who killed himself shortly after its completion. It launched in spite of this bad omen, and now thirty-some years later has become a degenerate microcosm of society, with still no destination in sight. The story is composed of a series of vignettes, not necessarily complete in their own right, but which interweave and combine to form a greater scene. The ship's chief engineer tells a far-fetched story of deadly, unnatural vermin that infest the ship's inner workings. A teenaged drug addict finds her salvation through a kindly old woman with a special smile. A man is convinced that the ship is trying to kill his wife. A jaded misanthrope tends a haunted library. Turf wars erupt, passengers declare war on their neighbors, and the poor struggle to feed their children. Grim on the face of it but filled with black humor, it's nearly as funny as it is bleak. But when the deceptively simple yet chilling secret of the Hope is finally revealed, the irony in the name of the ship will become clear, and the despair you'll feel for the crew and passengers trapped on its endless voyage will be very, very real. A modern gothic classic worth seeking out.