In the 23rd century, out of all the races of the galaxy, only humanity has discovered the secret of travel between the stars - not so much because we're so smart, but because we are incredibly gadget-oriented. We are also, compared to the galaxy's highly sophisticated norms, very, very tough, which most of the time does nothing for our social acceptability. But when a threat to all life in the galaxy arises from non-living biological constructs, suddenly the peculiar human virtues of valor and stubbornness make us the sword-wielding saviors of All.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Flawed, often hard to get into, but a must-read,
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This review is from: The Mind Pool (Mass Market Paperback)
Charles Sheffield's The Mind Pool is a rework of an older novel, The Nimrod Hunt. Centered around the hunt for a renegade artificial life-form, the novel paints a mixed picture of the future, with humans living in harmony with alien species, genetic engineering rampant and uncontrolled, a divided, violent, and irrelevant Earth, and a militaristic outer system.This is a difficult book to get into. Initial chapters are tedious and there are a lot of key characters who inter-develop as the the book continues which devolves quickly into a confusing mess. Sheffield's humour barely holds the story together as empathy with the main, distant and too many, characters seems close to impossible, and the reader is expected to take in a little too much, from different technologies to the behaviors of three wildly different species. The book, initially, also seems to live up to its back-cover synopsis, which in science fiction can be a bad thing, especially if the synopsis seems to be written to appeal to John W Campbell. The novel is saved by a number of factors: Sheffield's humour, naturally, helps. Certain characters become fleshed out and sympathetic. Some time about half way through the novel the pace and understandability of what is going on becomes quicker and easier. And then there's an absolutely beautiful twist concerning the very subject of the novel - and I say beautiful not just to describe the twist itself but the subject matter and the novel at that point, which just turned my opinion of the book on its head. This is a flawed novel. You should read it anyway.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Flawed but interesting SF remake of The Count of Monte Cristo. 3.6 stars,
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This review is from: The Mind Pool (Mass Market Paperback)
..
More accurately, Charles Sheffield's THE NIMROD HUNT, revised as THE MIND POOL, is explicitly an hommage to Alfred Bester's classic THE STARS MY DESTINATION, as Sheffield makes clear in his intro to the revised ed.: "I wanted to emulate the multitude of ideas...the blowzy rococo decadence of [Bester's] future society." Good line, that. And that part is pretty neat, and the best part of the novel. Bester explicitly based STARS on Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo (which you can read online for free). Unfortunately, MINDPOOL never really manages to integrate the good bits into a successful novel -- it's very episodic and disjointed, and deteriorates into pulpy silliness towards the end. I don't know if his first cut at it, NIMROD, was better. Huh. I guess Sheffield's Matin Link, introduced as a semi-joke in "Marconi, Mattin, Maxwell" (77), was intended as a mechanical jaunte-device all along... Anyway, I like the idea of successive remakes -- though it's been too long since I read MONTE CRISTO to recall if any of that survived into the Sheffield -- or indeed, if Sheffield knew of this influence on Bester. The endless, cross-generation sfnal internal dialogue, to paraphrase Greg Benford. Happy reading-- Peter D. Tillman
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Something Missing,
By
This review is from: The Mind Pool (Mass Market Paperback)
The Mind Pool tells the story of a future in which humans have encountered only three other intelligent species in the explored universe. The explored universe is essentially an ever exapanding sphere that radiates out as probes continue to move out through space and everything within this sphere is easilt reachable using "Mattin Links." What I find intiguing about this story is the description of three very different alien species and how they are thrown together with humans, the only "aggressive" species, to form a team. However, I felt that this particular plot point wasn't dealt with in an engrossing manner. The whole novel felt somewhat pieced together and was shorter than it should have been. The catalyst for the story, the Morgan Construct that poses a threat to the universe and the teams are sent to find, felt almost forgotten and I was unclear what role it served in the story except as a launching point. I enjoyed the story, but there were so many aspects to this universe that I would have liked to learn about and I felt like none of them were really explored in any depth. There was a subplot that was apparently left out of the original version of this story, called The Nimrod Hunt, that I felt was a hinderance to the story rather than adding anything and the author added back in merely because he was fond of it. The ending was somewhat confused and just seemed to stop and I wasn't really satisfied. I think I will pick up another of his books that isn't a rewrite of an earlier story and see how I like it.
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