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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
RICHTER 10, RATING 3, January 18, 2005
When this book eventually gets into its stride it's a lot better than you might think to begin with. Sir Arthur took to outsourcing his narratives with the later volumes of the Rama series, and at first I thought this was going to be as bad as those were. I reread it in the aftershock of the tsunami disaster of 12/26/04, something I wouldn't otherwise have done.
Clarke's true genius in fiction is as a short-story writer, and it seems to me that the great Childhood's End was the only real full-length novel he had in him. Even it hardly runs to 200 pages. The City and the Stars is slightly longer, but it is a reworking of an earlier 'novella' and gets a bit too big for its boots; and such productions as The Fountains of Paradise and Rendezvous with Rama itself are stretched to the limits of what he is comfortable with. Subcontracting was one answer, and this story is based on an outline plot by Clarke (provided at the back) fleshed out to full standard novel length by Mike McQuay. The opening chapters are bloodsome - stilted dialogue, cardboard cutouts of characters and the event that triggered the environmental disaster which forms the basis of the plot given to one of the characters to 'tell', in a plonking and ludicrous way, to other characters who must have known all about it in the first place. Matters then improve as the scientific issues take centre stage. This was really Clarke's secret. He deserves no less an accolade than as one of the major educators of our age, bringing physics and astronomy to the masses. Even in his fiction he is always didactic, always explaining this or that scientific issue or correcting popular misapprehensions. Once the science takes control of the narrative, the characterisation here becomes less important, more like the routine way Clarke himself handles it. The basic scenarios may seem fantastic and contrived, but the story is about what they would be like in real life (and real death on a large scale) supposing they did happen. One would not assess Stapledon on some basis of 'realism' and I for one am not inclined to assess his admirer Clarke on any such basis either. There is a real vision behind it all, an imaginative world. The disasters here are small beer indeed by comparison with Stapledon, and of course Clarke starts from a sound scientific grasp, something Stapledon never pretended to, and pushes the envelope to a certain extreme. How extreme he is really being I wouldn't like to judge, and not just because of recent events. This planet is a dynamic and unquiet thing.
Even the political background, which seems to border on farcical in the opening chapters, begins to fit in a little more as the book proceeds and as McQuay begins to take some recognisable stance of his own regarding it. I have no idea whether earthquakes can really be predicted let alone stopped, but if that gave us the opportunity to do something useful with the nukes at long last there would be two major benefits not one. The Richter 10 event is scheduled to take place shortly before my own 119th birthday, so I am unlikely to be a victim of it. Even my children are likely to be too old to care by then, whether or not southern California is by that time as familiar a stamping-ground of theirs as it already is of mine. I must say the thought of earthquakes is always somewhere at the back of my mind during my visits to Los Angeles. How this book will affect my thinking on any future visit I don't know, but I now have some elementary do's and don'ts to bear in mind from an informed source, much good may they do me.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Not excellent, but pretty good, December 1, 2003
This review is from: Richter 10 (Paperback)
As an Arthur C. Clarke junkie, I was surprised to find a book by hin that I hadn't read that was also eight years old. Well, it turns out that it wasn't really written by him, but he had enough input into it (see other reviews for details) that he got authorship credit (although he shouldn't have been at the top). About the only thing I had trouble with was the rash of intense and destructive earthquakes that kept showing up in the book. If such disasters happened at the rate and scale they did here, the world economy would really tank, but somehow they just seemed to cause ripples. I found the characters to be quite interesting and pretty believable, except for the male impersonator (no really good reason for that, and when the character was discussed, it was a bit confusing when folks called her "him" and when she was alone, she was "her"). This book is a definite page-turner, with just a few minor issues.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Good Read for When There's Nothing Better to Read, July 15, 2004
This review is from: Richter 10 (Paperback)
Richter 10 is, inmy opinion, a book to read when you're looking to pass the time. Summer vacation is one example. Prison is another. But whatever the circumstances may be, you will find that Richter 10 is nothing if not interesting. The author(s) of the book do many things right, while still managing to screw up the story. Surprisingly, it's about an earthquake. Several earthquakes, anyway. Crazy geologist Lewis Crane is hell-bent for revenge on earthquakes after one knocked off his parents in 1994. The book takes place in the early-mid 21st century, and we see several examples of advanced technology. Perhaps some of it is too advanced, but since we went from struggling to get a glider to hang in the air to putting men in space in about 50 years, maybe it is normal. Anyway, the characters and several parts of the story are not developed very well. We never really get to know the characters, so that when something good or bad happens, we couldn't care less. The characters aren't exactly good people, either. Crane has some good characteristics, but he is pretty much consumed by his power. His assistant, Dan Newcombe, goes from being a humble scientist to a megalomaniac in a few chapters. The book, though not being too long, drags on for quite a bit. There are ample oppurtunities to end the book, but the author(s) feel the need to keep it alive. Too much of a mediocre thing can be a bad thing. As another point of negativity, the ending sucks. I won't give it away, but, eh, it wasn't very good. In closing, I recommend this book to bored people who do not have anything else to do with their time. 50% of the population, in other words.
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