Customer Reviews

Marrow

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

The versatile and prolific Robert Reed is back with Marrow, a big novel about what is sometimes called a BDO, or Big Dumb Object. The BDO in this case is a huge spaceship, the size of Jupiter. Humans happen across it, and find it empty of life. They claim it, and turn it into a sort of tourist attraction: almost a cruise ship for cruising the Galaxy. Many separate species are hosted on the Ship, the passengers sometimes using the Ship to travel from star system to star system, but other times staying on for centuries or millennia, even joining the Ship's crew. The crew itself consists of a diverse variety of modified humans, including the Remoras, who live on the outside and repair the Ship's shell, and who have adapted to a lifetime spent in spacesuits; as well as the Captains, essentially immortal (like most humans), able to survive any injury that doesn't vaporize the head. The Master Captain has been with the Ship from its discovery, some 100,000 years. In all this time, nothing significant has been learned about the mysterious Builders of the Ship, or about the Ship's original purpose.

But a great new discovery has been made: there is a strange, iron, world at the very core of the Ship. This world is named Marrow, and a picked crew of the Ship's best Captains, including the Master's right-hand woman, Miocene, and a very talented Captain called Washen, are assigned to find a way to reach Marrow, and to explore it. With great difficulty, they manufacture a path down to the surface of Marrow, only to find it destroyed soon after they reach the surface. Thus begins a 5000 year effort to find a way back to the ship: and even that is only part of the action, as the plot takes numerous twists and turns, and several ideas are advance to explain Marrow and the Ship: all culminating in an action-filled conclusion.

The "Neat Idea" content of this book is impressive indeed. The Ship itself is a cool notion, and so is Marrow. Such inventions as the Remoras are also very fine, as are several of the alien species on the Ship. The plot drags a bit in the center portion, the long period spent on Marrow, but it is resolved pretty well, and with lots of excitement. There is a certain way in which things are almost too big, almost exhausting, and almost easy, in a way. This is a particular problem when considering the characters, Miocene and Washen and the others, who live for millennia but seem much like contemporary people. The magical tech which allows them to survive almost anything seems overconvenient at times, as well. But that's pretty much what you get when trying to consider such huge concepts: the characters are dwarfed, and so too are our usual standards for action and danger. For the most part, Reed delivers on the promises of this book: he promises Big Cool Ideas, and Action, and a satisfying resolution with at least something of an explanation for it all, and by and large, that's what Marrow has. It isn't fully successful, or fully involving on the character level, but it's pretty good.

Okay, first an editorial comment: I hate it when people review books on the basis of superficial resemblences to other works. This may have a big world ship, but that's where the resemblence to Rama ends, folks (nor was Rama the first: Heinlein's Universe, anyone?) -- if you want another Rama book, you should direct your comments to Clarke and Lee.

Now, if you can get past that, this is a work that has, I think, a genuinely audacious storyline. Perhaps TOO audacious for some tastes. We are talking about a storyline with hundred-thousand year old characters who are entirely willing to, among other things, wait five-thousand years (building an entire civilization in the process) in order to rescue themselves from being marooned.

The story is certainly an example of that grand old genre known as Space Opera. The science may be a tad "harder" than the old E.E. "Doc" Smith books, but only a tad. The sweep is epic and the characters are (quite literally) superhuman. People who are looking for either fine characterization or for hard technical science really should look elsewhere, because it ain't that sort of book. But if you can read it for what it is (especially if you are a fan of the old genre), I think that it stands up quite well. Certainly, it's not the perfect story -- the characters could have been rendered better, and the resolution seemed a bit forced -- but it is a GOOD example of what it is.

The book only "fails" if one judges it on the basis of what is not. At least that's my (not all that humble) opinion.

Okay, I've read the other reviews...all bad and so I am in the unique position of offering an opinion at the opposite end of the spectrum. First why should you believe me over the masses??? Well I've read almost everything ever written by Niven, Bear, Brin, Benford, McDevitt, Card, Gibson, Stephenson, Herbert, Bova, Vinge...and so on. Thus I believe I know a good story when I read one. The idea of a large alien ship floating through space, with the builders long since vanished, has been tried before. I will say that this book is much better than the first Rama book, which at times read like an encyclopia. The last (3) books in the Rama series were great due in no small part I'm sure to input from Gentry Lee. Now back to Marrow. What I liked about the book was that it did include reference to aliens on the ship. The author does go into some detail about (2) of the species, the Remoras and the Harrum-Scarums. True the character development isn't anywhere near what David Brin does with his Uplift saga, but it's good enough to hold your interest. What I liked is that the plot was like an onion. On the outside you have this vast ship, then if you look deeper you find a planet inside called Marrow, and if you look deeper inside Marrow there's something else...and so on. The plot unravels just like this, and at no time does this book become predictable..something I'm sure the critics of this book would have to agree. When I rate a book I compare it to other books not only in writing styles and how the book flows, but does it put forth new ideas. The idea of a ship in space isn't new, but having 200 billion travellers from various races is unique. The idea that people can live forever and sustain incredible amounts of damage and still live (they grow new bodies for you), is new to me. The concept of Marrow itself is new as is the super strong material "Hyperflux" which holds the planet in place. Was the book great? No, but its certainly better than the last (3) bookes written by Jack McDevitt. I'd give this book 3.5 out of 5.0 stars and will certainly read more of Reed.

This was an engrossing book with a lot of potential. I would give it 2.5 stars as it was fun to read and made me want to keep coming back throughout- there were no boring parts or places where the text dragged. There were constant changes and new unexpected developments. Particularly the final 2 pages are nothing of what I would expect. I wish I could comment on them without inserting major spoilers. Who would expect major cosmology from a simple science fiction work?

Now the caveats. The extremely long lives of the characters, described as near eternal, makes them very difficult to relate to. I am not eternal, least this side of death, and I know very few people who are. It is surprising for all of their developments that these eternals couldn't progress more spiritually and emotionally. They remained actually at a rather infantile psychological stage throughout their hundreds of thousands of years.

Secondly, the author's lack of thoroughness was irritating. Numerous grammatical mistakes were interspersed with plot continuity errors. I found myself a number of times suddenly totally lost as to how things had changed and come to this point, and would look back through the last few pages, only to discover there was no proper build-up to explain plot development or location. Similarly the technology, such as hyperfiber, is totally mysterious and even magical. Indeed, it is not until the near the end of the book when one finally hears a character share the nature of hyperfiber- only to be told that it has to do with quantum flux and otherwise, the characters don't understand it themselves! Most seriously, the summation is sudden and contrived. After so many pages of build up, everything comes together finally in a way that makes one wonder why it couldn't have come together that way all along. Even the metaphysical underpinnings of the entire ship, though very interesting and ingenious, are introduced simply as supposition which is then accepted as fact, without any explanation as to how the characters came up with these realizations. It reminded me of Star Trek Original Series episodes when Spock would offer a possible hypothesis, and then everyone would immediately assume that this hypothesis was in fact Truth.

All this said, I would still recommend reading it- I was unable to put it down. Fun, pulp, fiction. But not anything to turn the world upside down with.

When I was maybe twelve years old, I read a Scientific American article about planet sizes and the potential for rocky (as opposed to gas giant) planets as many as 50 times the size of the earth in diameter. Big planets, like big space ships and big dinosaurs, are inherently cool. Right? Robert Reed's Great Ship is 20 times the size of the earth in diameter (or is it volume? I forget) and therefore contains awesome, gigantic, enormous, titanic spaces within its hyperalloy hull.

It can be fun for a while to imagine what you would do with so much space, but only for a while. That's why MARROW has a plot ... of sorts. The novel revolves around a the efforts of a set of "captains" (top-level Ship officers) to solve a nested set of mysteries, starting with the mystery of who built the Big Ship, what its purpose is, why the Builders stuffed a Mars-sized world ("Marrow") into the middle of the Ship, and how Marrow relates to the overall purpose of the Builders. (Hint: None of these mysteries will be solved definitively in either of the first two volumes of the not-yet-completed trilogy to which MARROW belongs.)

Although Reed tells his story in a standard linear fashion with occasional flashbacks and (in the case of the Ship) musings by inanimate objects, I think it's fair to say that he is not overly attentive to narrative conventions. This is my way of saying that his story lines sometimes make unexpected sharp turns, that what he tells you at one point may well turn out to be false later on, that his pacing can go from sluggish to bullet-fast and back to sluggish without much provocation, and that he sometimes makes huge leaps in logic and narrates events in ways that are impossible to follow. These narrative flaws often make the book frustrating and annoying to read, but they don't overwhelm its positive qualities.

The positive qualities are a good dose of gee-whiz, some convincing and not-too-overly-didactic physics, astronomy, and cosmology, and skillful use of the Ship's mysteries to draw the reader in and create a compulsion to keep on reading. This might not be award-winning science fiction, but it is solid; it is the good stuff.

Bottom line: If you've never read Scientific American, you might not like this book, but I heartily recommend this book to any true science fiction fan.

The starting premise is promising -- a derelict spaceship as large as Jupiter, with a much smaller hidden planet floating at its core. It's downhill from there for several reasons. First, as other reviewers have noted, the immortal characters do not develop over the several thousand years in which we follow them (and not only don't they develop, but most of them have only one character trait: a psychotic degree of ambition). Second, although the ship is crammed with members of many intelligent species (because humans have turned the ship into a circum-galactic tour bus) there is no inter-species conflict or communication or misunderstanding or any interaction whatever -- the entire drama is strictly between humans. What is the point of the tour bus idea, for crying out loud? Third (and least important of my objections, but it seems odd), the book presumes that intelligent life is common in the galaxy, but intelligence apparently never developed in billions of years of evolution on the planet at the core of the ship. **SPOILER ALERT, ENDING ABOUT TO BE DISCUSSED** Finally, the ending premise about the underlying nature of the ship does not hold water. On the one hand, the mysterious Builders made the ship as a huge and infinitely diversifiable habitat so that whoever finds the ship can live there and invite plenty of guests as well. On the other hand, it turns out that the core of the ship is really a prison for some dreadful being, and apparently to keep the prison unnoticed and undisturbed forever (to a first approximation) the Builders launched the ship on a trajectory that kept it away from anywhere life might thrive for somewhere between 5 and 15 billion years... Now come on. It is not sensible to make sure that the thing cannot be found for at least several billion years, and at the same time make it a habitat that any form of intelligent life could and would use. Evidently the Builders guessed it would be found eventually -- but so what? Why make it a highly desirable habitat for critters that might let the prisoner escape? If Reed hinted at any reason for doing so, the hint was too subtle for me.

No one knew where the gigantic ship came from or how old it was or who built it. It sailed the galaxies for untold eons before intelligent life forms discovered it. The first discoverers attempted to destroy it, fearing its immensity, but the Ship was made to withstand the worst of weapons. Eventually, some creatures boarded the ship and made it their home. Over the millennia, it became a universe all its own, filled with untold types of species and creatures living inside immense areas of their own design, creatures whose knowledge had made them virtually immortal. One day, out of the blue, the ship's best captains were assembled and shown an inconceivable site-the gigantic spaceship, bigger than worlds, had a planet inside its core. The captains were sent to explore the fearsome, inhospitable planet, and in so doing they became trapped on the harsh land they called Marrow. For millennia they worked and waited, unsure if the Master and the ship's passengers had perished or simply forgotten them. The children of the settlers broke away from their Loyalist forebears and forged their own society, calling themselves the Waywards, great Builders reborn. Miocene, the Loyalist leader, and her son Till became bitter enemies. After untold years of waiting, the return of the lost captains would change life inside the Ship forever.

The book moves along quite well as we see the selected captains travel down to the impossible planet Marrow and forge a life for themselves after their entrapment in that fierce environment. The first problems come with the return of the lost Captains from Marrow back to the ship. The novel seems to be too epic in its scope, and Reed basically skips right over some of the drastic changes that have taken place on Marrow. The actions of Miocene, a central character, change drastically during these years hidden from our eyes, and her role in the takeover of the Ship never makes perfect sense to me. The first half of the book builds up to the return from Marrow to the ship, yet the section following that historic event disrupts the flow of the story by pausing to explain what has been going on onboard the ship over the intervening years and acquainting us with Pamir, one of the novel's prominent heroes in the battle for control of the Ship. This does great damage to the flow of the novel, and it never fully recovers its initial momentum. Things begin to happen too fast toward the end, and the actions and motivations of several key characters are hard to discern.

While this book does have a few weaknesses in plot and character development, the overall story is wonderfully different and quite enjoyable. With the exception of the interlude of sorts in the middle, the plot moves along very well. Sometimes it moves too fast, causing me trouble in correlating what was being done by whom and for what reason. Some of the science is not adequately explained, but this was not a big issue for me because I found the whole idea behind the novel delightfully different and compelling. Once the story gets going, its energy drew me further and further into it and left me anxious to see just how events would play out in the end. A few surprises could have been explained more fully, but overall I was quite impressed with this science fiction novel.

I absolutely LOVED this book!!! I was in a reading lull when I found this book and WOW did it blow me away with it's grand adventure and huge ideas. A giant planet sized ship roaming the galaxy, touring the arms of galaxies, picking up strange alien passengers while civil wars rages in the decks below. What more could you ask for? Better characterization? Come on people, this is science fiction. Big ideas and big adventure and this book has more of these than most that I've read in my reading career.

Marrow by Robert Reed is one of the best SF novels I've read all year. It is quintessential SF, full of brave ideas and bold speculations.

A giant starship enters the Milky Way. Where did it come from? Projecting its trajectory backwards gives no indication at all of its origin. It is an old ship - some evidence suggests that it is billions of years old. It seems to have been constructed from a Jupiter type planet; there are many, many miles of corridors and chambers hewn out of the solid rock. And they are all cold, deserted and empty. It seems almost as though there has never been anyone on the ship in its long, cold, lonely journey across time and space.

A crew of humans investigates and takes over the ship. Genetic engineering has assured them of near immortality and they determine to take the ship on a journey through the galaxy, picking up passengers as and when they wish (charging a suitable fee of course) for the ultimate sight seeing trip.

For thousands of years all goes well, but as the main part of the story opens, a group of senior officers have vanished as they set out to explore an enigma - the planet they call Marrow which they have discovered isolated in the heart of the ship. Well mapped and explored though the ship is, it seems that it still has mysteries to be investigated.

For more than five thousand years they are marooned on Marrow, forced to build a civilisation from scratch, forced to cope with dissension and mutiny, rebellion and heresy.

After this time of trial and tribulation, they return to the ship that abandoned them to Marrow. They are lean and mean, hardened and tempered by their experiences, and the ship's somewhat decedent crew are easy prey to their ferocity. But the ship, and Marrow and even their own people still have surprises in store for them.

The sheer scale of the canvas is awe-inspiring. The vastness of space and time has seldom been more evocatively invoked, and neither has the minutiae of domestic politics and power plays - the novel spans the whole spectrum of human endeavour. It is utterly gripping.

The storytelling was good enough that I finished the book, but I almost put it down halfway through. It got kind of depressing. I've read several good books about humans that live beyond the normal span. Reed doesn't make his millenia-old humans believable. However, I did like the way nigh-immortals have learned not to fear getting hurt.

Some of the things they do are unrealistic for people of any age. With extensive character development, it's possible to make some bizarre actions believable. But Reed doesn't do that.

The danger of letting a schizophrenic who hallucinates messages from the gods ("The Builders") start an opposing culture is obvious. I knew what was going to happen the moment I read the scene where the kids leave. There's just no way that the cream of the crop of millenia old captains would not see that and prevent it.

[spoiler warning] How does Till convince all the children to believe his stories and keep it secret? When the story comes out, why do the parents let their offspring leave? And with little or no argument?? No, at least some of them would insist on locking their kids up and deprogramming them. When Miocene takes a shot to reach the stub of the old bridge, she only takes one person? No way. Not knowing what's going on up there, the wise thing to do would be to take as many as the ship would hold, armed to the teeth. What if everyone had died and a hostile species had taken over? [/spoiler]