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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Best in the 3 Book Series, October 2, 2006
This review is from: The Ocean of Years (The Chronicles of Solace, Book 2) (Mass Market Paperback)
If you can get past the fact that Allen has a habit of being repetitive, especially considering no one is reading the second book if they have not read the first, then you can enjoy this as the best and most interesting of the three in the series.
Of all three books, here we get to really see Allen's vision of the future, how humanity has stagnated and the populace has ignored the clues to the impending crisis. The most enjoyable section of the book was the image and description of The Permanent Physical Collection, the housing of all the books in a giant space habitat orbiting Neptune. As has been discussed in tech circles and other sci-fi books, the weakest link in our push towards a total digital age is being able to store the original source material in accessible form, ie paper.
The failed terraforming experiment of Mars was also an enjoyable read, as Koffield and Norla go searching through the suppressed technology hidden by the time patrol. Finally, after playing Wile E Coyote to DeSilvo's roadrunner, Koffield finally catches up with DeSilvo, but of course, we are left to a resolution in the third book.
The book/series certainly have some weak points. Many of the themes are common in other sci-fi stories, Allen really could have told the story in two books, and whatever issues you want to throw into a book with some form of time travel. However, despite those weaknesses, the story is compelling, and I found myself extremely interested in two of the three main characters, Koffield and Norla.
As an aside, Greg Bridges did the artwork on the cover of the book, which I enjoyed so much I found his website and ordered a print. He does many sci-fi covers and in my opinion is one of the best along with Jim Burns.
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7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
In Pursuit of a Mad, Plagiarizing Terraformer..., June 25, 2002
This review is from: The Ocean of Years (The Chronicles of Solace, Book 2) (Mass Market Paperback)
Picking up where "The Depths of Time" left off, "The Ocean of Years" forms the second part of Allen's "Chronicles of Solace" and sends Admiral Koffield and the crew of the Dom Pedro IV hurrying back to the Solar System to find word of Oskar deSilvo's whereabouts. Allen's universe here revolves around an Earth and its colonies linked together by a series of timeshaft wormholes: that is, a series of fixed-distance wormholes through time that allow ships (none of which are capable of faster-than-light travel) to objectively experience a hundred-plus year trip through time in a subjective period of days or weeks. The concept is a bit complex (requiring a chart and full-page explanation at the start of each book), but comes off as oddly plausible once you think through the myriad implications of the system - which Allen seems to do well. In this trilogy, outer terraformed colonies are beginning to die and the only answers as to why are linked with their terraformer - Oskar deSilvo. A man thought dead halfway through the first book, he is hiding in an undisclosed location having provided, essentially, a maze for the crew of the Dom Pedro IV to run to find him. Taking them the libraries orbiting Neptune to Earth to the long-ruined, fungally-overgrown Mars, the book is essentially a series of mysteries laid out and solved by the crew in their attempt to not only find out where deSilvo is, but what implications his pre-hibernation discoveries have for the worlds colonized by Earth. While this book makes an excellent middle chapter in the trilogy - building on the first one and naturally extrapolating much higher stakes for the third, it does suffer from a few small problems. One is that it's virtually impossible to understand if you haven't read "The Depths of Time". While he tries to being new readers up to speed, he does so over the first hundred or so pages of the book, creating a bit of a jumble in terms of the action occurring. I found even having read the first book six or nine months ago, I was getting lost having forgotten many of the main details. Likewise, his pacing occasionally suffers from unpredictable stutters. Stylistically, it lags or surges forward at odd times. There were parts in the middle - and near the end that dragged by as you waited for characters to move on to the next key. In the same way, occasional pieces of the puzzle were laid out only to be immediately solved by the characters - not giving the reader a chance to try to stay one jump ahead of the mystery. Nonetheless, though, this is still an outstanding book. His universe is based on a novel idea and is well extrapolated from that point. The shadowy, background villains stay suitably shadowy and a good sense of paranoia slowly infuses the book. If you read - and enjoyed - "The Depths of Time", definitely give this one ago (after having, perhaps, flipped through the first again). If not, go back and pick up "The Depths of Time"; it's worth the read.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
What's The Point?, March 13, 2009
This review is from: The Ocean of Years (The Chronicles of Solace, Book 2) (Mass Market Paperback)
Number 2 in the Chronicles of Solace, this continues in the world of the 54th century, where humans have terraformed over 50 worlds, but the total human population is only one billion, with half that on Earth. Space travel is via the novel method of covering half the distance to a destination at 0.1C, ducking into a wormhole to a distance in the past equal to the entire trip length, then finishing the second half at 0.1C again, so that you arrive about the time you left.
So far, so good. But the entire story is spent chasing the villain, who supposedly destroyed the terraforming on one world, botched another, destroyed a wormhole, and left clues all over space to lead our heroes on a interstellar scavenger hunt. The clues are lame. One based on a Shakespeare quote would be opaque to 99% of people today (its usually misquoted), let alone to people in another 3,300 years. All the activity happens at the author's whim, not to any serious plan.
The author tells us that terraforming cannot succeed, and all the colonies are going to die. An extremely unlikely scenario given millenia of research. We are shown an uber-library in orbit of Neptune, but with few exceptions the design of the library seems more 19th century than modern. We are shown a terraforming failure on Mars, where mutant mold eats everything, yet the quarantine of the planet is so lame our villein and the heroes both sneak in and out with little trouble.
The technology just isn't convincing. The players actions aren't convincing. For example, would you go land on a hostile planet without so much as a pocket knife for tools? The villain isn't convincing, No matter how big his ego.
I predict that the third book will introduce the miraculously discovered FTL drive, heal all the planets, vindicate the villain and the hero, and all will live happily ever after.
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