Customer Reviews

Land's End

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I urge to you stay away from this book. It is by far the worst novel, SF or otherwise, that I have ever had the displeasure to read. Its very, very few redeeming aspects did little to alleviate the extremely frustrating, annoying, predictable and dumb parts of this book. As an avid SF fan and huge admirer of Frederik Pohl's, I was deeply disappointed.

The characters were the most pathetic I have ever encountered - they were completely flat and one-sided, totally naive, and uttered such annoying dialogue that I wanted to smack most of them every time they opened their mouths. Except for one, who I loved, but by the time she next appeared she had given birth, and, mysteriously, was stripped of all the interesting parts of her character and became solely a mother to her child.

The plot was predictable and surprisingly uninteresting. For a book about a comet striking the Earth (almost - the best part of the premise, one of the book's few highlights, is not the damage the impacts cause, but the damage inflicted onto the ozone layer and electronic equipment, by the comet's gases and EMPs. Sadly, this gem of a premise is strangled by the poor story in which it is presented), _Land's End_ is remarkably lacking in any sort of tension, suspense, or credible emotion.

At first, I thought the story was supposed to be some sort of fable or satire - where such hollow, annoying characters and such a preachy plot (filled with extremely obvious references to our current polluting of the environment and relations with animals) would be successful. But _Land's End_ takes itself too serious to be a satire and aims for too tangled a complexity (in both plot and execution) to be a fable.

The only two redeeming features of _Land's End_ - the secondary effects of a comet strike and the underwater 18 Cities - do not redeem it enough to make this book worth reading. For a much more exciting, captivating, and realistic comet-strike book, try Niven and Pournelle's _Lucifer's Hammer_ (their _Mote In God's Eye_ is also a MUCH better novel on the topic of first contact with aliens; as is Carl Sagan's _Contact_. Actually, just about any book is better than this one, regarding aliens. Pohl and Williamson's "Eternal" alien was like something cast by a Hollywood agent with no imagination beyond a half-drunken viewing of "Independence Day" - cliche, boring, and so overwraught as to be unintentionally comical.)

If I could give a negative amount of stars to this book, I would. It is, by far, the poorest SF novel I have ever read.

If there was a prozac for books, this book would need a dose of it. Dumb, pointless plot. Dumb, pointless characters. A substandard effort from Pohl, who is one of my favorite authors.