Lightpaths [Paperback]

Howard V. Hendrix (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 1997

In a self-contained city high above the Earth, four thousand permanent residents come to the startling conclusion that their orbiting complex is far from the utopia they had believed it to be. Original."

Product Details

• Paperback: 10 pages
• Publisher: Ace (September 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0441004709
• ISBN-13: 978-0441004706
• Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 4.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,750,195 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Warning: Not For Everybody!, February 27, 2000

By 

frumiousb "frumiousb" (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Lightpaths (Paperback)

I want to start by saying that I really enjoyed this book. That is, once I realized what it is. Or rather, what it isn't. This book is pushed as science fiction with names like Heinlein and Gibson mentioned on the cover and it is science fiction in the sense that it's fiction set in the future in a set-up generated by scientific advances-- but it isn't science fiction in terms of adhering to classic genre rules or plot. Several points:

1) This is a novel musing on the possibility of Utopia in a future where our 'greed and growth' (as the book puts it) have grown to dangerous proportions.

2) Not a whole lot happens to anything except on an internal and a narrowly interpersonal level. Don't look for action.

3) Occasionally very dense passages heavily laced with current and historic utopian thinkers. I've read 'em, so it meant something to me. I shudder to think what it would have been like if I hadn't.

4) Charactization gets lost, sometimes, in all the philosophizing. Roger, in particular, feels a little bit stock.

5) The ending has some definite lameness. It's as though he suddenly woke up and decided he had to put some action in, quick. So he did.

If you go into the book while knowing all of the above, you may well enjoy it quite a bit. If you go in expecting escapist genre fiction, it's really going to suck.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A horrendous disappointment, July 13, 2000

By 

Lee Gaiteri (Syracuse, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Lightpaths (Paperback)

Don't let the quote about being a cross between Heinlein and Gibson fool you: Lightpaths is tragically nothing like either.

To begin with, the book is probably preachier than most religious texts ever written, but with less meat to it. The concept: If we all just try a little bit harder to get eutopia right, we can do it. (That alone should prove it's not anything like Gibson.) But even people who can stomach this ridiculous premise will have trouble with the way that the book is crafted.

The plot... isn't there. I read the entire book, and I assure you there is absolutely no plot. There are hints of a plot from time to time, inklings at the end of a chapter that something might be starting to happen, but ultimately these fizzle out and most go either unexplained or else aren't exhumed until the end. The book takes place over about a month, during which huge crisis situations are largely ignored by the characters in the best position to do anything. (Apparently this is okay, because everything sorts itself out in the end without anyone having to do anything except stand around and explain it to the reader. Yay.)

The characters are somewhat worse than the plot. Almost every single one is obsessed with the idea of eutopia, above and beyond what could be explained away by the selection process used to determine the Orbital Park's population. Large segments of the book are spent following Marissa's astoundingly tedious researches into eutopia under the guidance of Roger's equally tedious mother, or Jhana's aimless wandering around the station when she's supposed to be doing something--but doesn't. Roger, the only skeptic in the bunch, loses his value as a character when he goes insane (for reasons that were somehow never explained), basically showing that the only sane people are the starry-eyed weirdos who aren't doing anything. There are of course other characters who can deal with the vital systems threatened by the seemingly unimportant crisis, but their effort is spent mostly on preparing for a new concert. Somehow I think that hostile computer code infesting the life-support system and churning out mysterious satellites that provoke military reactions is a little more serious an issue, but then I guess it's okay to put that on hold for three or four days before talking to the right people or checking out the hardware. After all, entertainment is more important than breathing.

But there's more to say about the preachiness. The characters--all except Roger--are preachy. The climax of the book is preachy. As the non-plot develops it gets even preachier. And every single character nods along with this like a mob of zombies, with no real sense of fear about the important things going on around them. By the end I couldn't stop rolling my eyes.

The moral of the story is: When magic mushrooms are your main character, who needs a plot?

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Too boring to finish, January 3, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Lightpaths (Paperback)

I *always* finish a book once I start it... but not this one. I got about a third of the way through it and gave up after realizing that I didn't know or care what I had just read over the last couple of pages. Nothing ever happened, it was just people talking (or reading) about their personal philosophies of life and 'utopia'. Don't bother.