Customer Reviews

Orbitsville

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I read this book after reading Shaw's Wooden Spaceships series. Both are fairly good, and I have always wondered why more people don't know about Bob Shaw. Someone above said this book is worse then Ringworld which is totally false. Whatever you do don't read the sequal, Orbitsville Departure, as it was pretty awful.

I'm yet to read a bad Bob Shaw book, but neither have I read an absolute masterwork by him. He tends to find an idea and sets out to examine it within the plot of a story, 'Orbitsville' is no exception.

The captain of an exploration starship, on the run from a corrupt regime, discovers an enormous hollow sphere. This metallic sphere completely surrounds a sun, with a radius akin to the distance of the earth to the sun. The inside surface of this sphere is billons of times larger than the surface of the earth and is covered with soil, seas, grass, mountains etc and is just ripe for settling on and the perfect escape for the denizens of an overcrowded earth. This is the background of the short novel that Shaw has whipped up.

‘Orbitsville’ will unfortunately draw unfavourable comparisons with Larry Niven’s ‘Ringworld’ and although they are outwardly similar, they principally concern different subjects. Where ‘Ringworld’ is about the exploration of the Ring, Orbitsville is more about size of the object being explored. Regardless, 'Orbitsville’ is still a fine read and Shaw skilfully holds the attention of the reader. 3.5-4/5

Although the idea of a dyson sphere is not new, the author has managed to include in a reasonably interesting story. I do not like , however, that you read half the book before you get to the interesting parts. the ideal of the story, the utopian rural society, has proved to be disastrous when tried in cambodia, I dont think that this should the future of the human race.

This is an enduring favourite of mine. The twist in the plot comes early but the book maintains a wonderful sense of wonder and adventure right through to the end. I'd read several reviews that suggested Larry Niven's Ringworld was a better book but I found it quite the opposite.

After first reading this, I searched for and read as many of Shaw's books as I could find. It is fantastic to see such a great number of his novels, so long out of print, being made available for Kindle. This is exactly what should be happening. Unfortunately, at $8.32 each, grabbing the entire collection would be a prohibitively expensive exercise. Perhaps the publisher should consider offering them as a bundle, like a DVD Box Set. As it is, I'll but the two or three books I've not read and not worry about the others.

Vance Garamond, a flickerwing commander, is waiting to meet Elizabeth Lindstrom, the richest person in the word, the president of Starflight; megalomanic sovereign tyrant who has space travel monopolized to her alone. To appreciate the commander's patience, her young son -- the to be crown prince of flickerwing empire -- keeps him company. The young boy has lived sheltered life and Vance lets him loosen up by running free in the garden. But then the boy gets reckless and climbs on a statue ... and falls. They boy is dead, his skull was crushed by gravity. The drips of waiting time to meet Elizabeth is soon spent; and payback awaits. Elizabeth's wrath will kill him, his wife and his only son. Vance rushes to his home, grabs his beloved ones, heads to his flickerwing ship and lifts off to the stars; anywhere. He encounters a 2 AU diameter wide object. A solid sphere whose inner surface has five billion times Earth's land area. Suddenly the power balance shifts. He's a hero and it will be hard for Elizabeth to touch him directly in the eyes of Earth citizens. The sphere is an answer to Earth's population problem: a vast land of grass-covered hills and valleys which is perfect for colonisation; size of greater than that of hundreds of million Earths.

This alien-built, spherical structure is changing the destiny of the human race. In 1960 man named Freeman Dyson suggested that advanced alien civilizations would rebuild their solar systems into "Dyson spheres" enclosing the sun and harnessing all its output. Shaw broods on the unimaginable vastness of the entire sphere. He is also good at writing driven characters, characters that aren't likeable but to whom one may be sympathetic and Vance is certainly one of these. This novel is the first of loose Orbitsville trilogy. The other books are Orbitsville Departure (1983) and Orbitsville Judgement (1990).

Three (3) stars. Written in 1975 this book won British Science Fiction Award for Best Novel 1976. The start of the story is among one of the best in its unexpectedness. The size of the book, 140 pages, however does not have a chance to cover all the subplots included: the Starflight empire, earth politics, alien structure (philosophy: who built this), a ship wreck inside sphere (think Columbus' journeys), primitive alien life encounter, and Vance's vendetta against Elizabeth after her got his wife and son. The reflection of 1970's can be seen in Vance's relationship with his wife which is unbelievable thin; TV is all she believes, and she sympathizes more Elizabeth than her husband. The book had the tension and potential to go in any direction, but spreading focus in too many directions weakened the mystery. Overall interesting read.

This book, with its imaginitive theme and good implementation, this is a very good book. The writer takes Freeman Dyson's idea of an artificially-enclosed star with an earth-like environment of enormous area and all its unique problems and situations is very good. I recommend it for any sci-fi fan.

Shaw is an ideas man, always good with a gimmick. His early novels, like NIGHTWALK, turned high concepts into rattling good yarns. With ORBITSVILLE, the gimmick is a Dyson's sphere: a planet built around a sun. The landmass is huge, billions of square miles. Imagine getting lost on it. Well, you don't have to. Half of Shaw's novel is about that. There's lots of empty space(as you'd imagine). Shaw does the "how-the-hell-are-we-going-to-find-our-way-home" subplot adequately, but on the occasions when his heroes stumble upon the planet's inhabitants Shaw's ingenuity dims. His aliens are a decidedly uninteresting lot. This wouldn't be so bad if the novel's main characters had any kind of depth, but the wooden hero doesn't develop beyond steadfast, and the spidery villainess is strictly saturday morning cartoon. A chase across a galactic empire gives a liveliness to the first quarter of the book, but it comes to an abrupt halt once the Dyson sphere looms into view. All rather disappointing, considering this book's reputation: Hugo award, in some top 100 lists. Larry Niven plays with the same idea more colourfully in RINGWORLD. In comparison, ORBITSVILLE is dullsville (sorry, I just had to).