Customer Reviews

SAILING BRIGHT ETERNITY (Bantam Spectra Book)

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

 

 

Mr. Gregory Benford is a talented author. His
novel Timescape is evidence enough. In fact,
this particular series began well, with
the story of Killeen Bishop and his embattled
tribe, fighting a desperate, bleeding war against
the interesting "mechs." The next three
volumes (or is it four? five?) however show
the plot to be on a montonically decreasing curve,
increasingly stuffed with the latest physics mumbo-jumbo, and wow gee science in the best tradition of popular mechanics, at the cost of character development and story line.

This last volume is indeed the worst. I found myself caring little about Mr. Bishop and his son, the accompanying cyber-a(u)nt that keeps slipping in and out of esty's, whatever the hell they are.

And Nigel Walmsley. Of course there has to be
such a character in all such stories spanning
a godzillion years. He is the guy who remembers
what the word "coffee" meant, or that people
travelled in "subways", and other nuggets to
keep the cosmic brouhaha in perspective.
It seems to me that Mr.Benford wrote two
different sets of stories, and then couldn't
resist the fatal impulse to merge unlikely situations and characters into one huge, ugly
heap. Consider: the mechs attack the humans in the
early 21st century, and humans not only survive
but even capture a scouting ship, and drive
it to the center of the galaxy. Huh uh.

Mr. Benford takes tired old themes from Dawkin's
memes argument, Cairns-Smith's "we came from clay"
theory, Turing's "no virus checker is possible"
result, and the result is a Maalox moment.
30,000 years into the future and we
discover that the 20th century biolgists and
physicists were right after all. Huh uh.

Perhaps most curious of all is how
thoroughly "mechanical" Mr Benford's picture of the world is. Even culture, to which the mechs
finally succumb, is reduced to vague little
memes. From clay to the old ones. From carbon
to human. From silcon to mechs. And memes to
bind them all. And a final peevish point:
BEWARE of a book that
uses different FONTS to mark the intelligence
levels of its characters. It suggests that
the author doesn't have enough confidence in
the content of his character's statements and
relies instead on type weight to give their
utterances the necessary importance. Please
Mr Benford, do make your higher beings talk in
Roman 12 point next time. It really is
an awful strain.

Perhaps Dr. Benford didn't give himself enough time to produce the conclusion this series really deserved. The preceding books, "In the Ocean of Night" (1977), "Across the Sea of Suns" (1984), "Great Sky River" (1987), "Tides of Light" (1989), and "Furious Gulf" (1994) had set up a galaxy of humans, intelligent mechanical entities, vast magnetic beings, myriapodia and other varied aliens, complex astrophysical structures, some artificial, surrounding the galactic center, and the chaotic and uncertain "esty" in the wedge hugging the galactic black hole. Each preceding book had introduced fascinating new entities inhabiting the galaxy and locations for the drama to play out, but this one stayed within the final "esty", chaotic and perhaps infinitely varied to be sure, but somehow full of sameness in its chaos.

The new characters here are god-like higher beings hinted at in the earlier books - and their actions are really not well explained, except that they ally themselves temporarily with the humans against the mechanicals, to turn things around from the death and destruction wrought to this point. The "esty" (space-time or S-T) was specifically designed by these higher beings in the distant past to accommodate organic life and exclude the machines. This last novel journeys, at one point, billions of years into the future; it also finds Toby in adventures that echo Mark Twain's Mississippi river boat escapades, though here he is going uphill on a river of flowing time. The varied human settlements in the "esty" are occasionally fascinating, but as with the environment itself, there's a certain sameness that seems to stretch the novel beyond what is really needed.

We do learn more about Nigel Walmsley here, clarifying some of the connections between the first two books and the remainder of the series. And the mystery of why Killeen, his father, and his son are so important is resolved, though in a somewhat hokey fashion (does the DNA explanation really make any sense?) The conflict and contrast between humans and mechanicals is further elucidated: the robot/mechanical minds lack laughter, and wonder what purpose it serves. They see life very differently: their minds can be eternal, even as their bodies are frequently discarded and replaced with new upgraded models. In contrast, organic life starts anew with each generation; minds are constantly renewed and also constantly faced with their own extinction - is that the root of the difference? And yet the "higher powers" seem to have overcome these differences, though Benford has little description of how that could happen - and what exactly have they done with Walmsley, who is surely not the same as the original after all these years?

The end for the powerful Mantis is another long trek that seems sad and almost purposeless - couldn't we just get it over with? Benford does finally get to a reasonable conclusion; it's not a bad one, there's hope for the future. But compared to the other novels in the series, this one is certainly a disappointment.

This final novel in the "Galactic Center" set proves that even on a bad day, Benford can still whip out a fairly decent yarn.

Not up to his usual caliber, this novel seems even more disjointed than the previous few, and so much less lovingly spun than the "Ocean of Night" which started the series off. The changes in font are positively annoying, and the character development - or lack thereof - reduces the believability and likability of the people we're supposed to be rooting for. Particularly implausable is the dangerous, tin-man Mantis, whose mysterious and compelling behavior in the earlier novels is reduced to trying to find a "heart". I was sorely disappointed in this outcome, and I won't even discuss what a pitiful, sex-starved moron that Nigel Walmsley has become. It's just too painful.

Despite these and other disappointments, I have to give Benford credit for leaving this capstone open-ended, and providing the glorious, off-beat energy that makes his works so readable. I've never even written a published novel, and Benford has managed to pull together so much in this series, despite the reduction in degrees of freedom that the previous novels require to hold the story together. I can't help being reminded of Arthur C. Clark's "2010" where they somehow managed to change planets from Saturn to Jupiter. Sequels can be tough to pull off. We backed Benford into a corner, (or maybe he did it himself), and he performed well enough to merit a moderate "thumbs-up". I have definitely read worse

I started reading Benford's "Galactic Center" novels when the first one (Into the Ocean of Night) came out. I loved the first three, but the two prior to "Sailing" became slightly tedious, although they were good enough to keep me reading and to buy the next ones as they appeared. "Sailing" has it flaws and excesses (I became very impatient with the "Life on the Missisippi" part), but overall it is a great novel and a fitting end to the impressive series. I loved the re-appearance of good old Nigel, as well as Nikka (although, again, the "Little House on the Prairie/in the ESTY" was a bit hard to take). I am a psychopharmacologist and a biological psychologist, and Benford's observations about human brain function and some of our biological underpinnings were right on the mark, and were woven into the story in a masterful way. I suspect that some of his astrophysics speculation, while apparently based on our current knowledge, may be a bit...weak? chintzy? - but still, this is great hard sci-fi. In the summary or synopsis of the 30,000+ stretch of time covered in the series,(at the very end of the book), it is apparent that there could be many other stories told about this sequence... for instance, some of the things happening on Earth as the mechs made successive attacks and before the humans departed for galactic center. Also, what, if anything was left of old earth 30,000 years later. I suppose the best indicator of how much I like this conclusion of the series is that I dug out my old copy of the first novel in the series, and then found the second (Across the sea of suns) in a used book store, so I coul re-read both of them. "Sailing" has a few flaws, but overall it is grand in scope and a dynamite book. I am Perry Duncan, and I live in Norfolk, Virginia.

After struggling for months, I finally got through the Galactic Center "epic" (and I use the word loosely) by Gregory Benford. To say that the series was a major let-down doesn't half-cover it. I've read a lot of sci-fi novels, and I can't remember being that disappointed before, except with the works of Linda Nagata and Howard Hendricks (both certified 0-starers, IMHO). Let's see...

First of all, the characters are despairingly two-dimensional (make that one, for some). You don't know what they're here for and, frankly, you don't very much care. The story (or lack thereof) is strange to say the least: despite raves such as "no holds-barred adventure", nothing much happens, so that the books are marginally less thrilling than a 2,000-page financial report. (The focus of the story is a giant black hole at the center of the galaxy, and I can't help wondering whether that prompted Mr Benford to write books which are so empty of meaning. And to think that he needed almost twenty years to produce them!)

I won't even speak of the way a 30,000+ war against mechs (yuck!) is resolved in 3 minutes flat. I know it ain't over till the fat lady sings, but still...

Some aliens are interesting, but the story moves along and leaves them behind each time you think you're going to learn something about them! So tell me - why are they here? As filler? Hum. (For example, the best part of the series is, for me, the novella-size sea adventure of Warren in book two. But the aliens he meets are never spoken of again, and Warren himself disappears from the story after that. So, once again, what's the point?)

And the esty - a collection of places/times where/when one of the characters wanders for about 100 pages, meeting all kinds of people who don't have anything to do with the story. The first time is painful enough, but Mr. Benford does it to you *three* times in a row! A piece of advice if I may, Mr Benford: next time you want to write a book, please wait until you've got a real story, and not some disjointed ideas to mix randomly, because the resulting mix can be awful. And the philosophy of it! "The thing about aliens is, they're alien." Wow! OK, but once would be enough, don't you think? Why rehash it every ten pages or so?

If they awarded a price for "best disappointment of the year", this book (indeed, the whole series) would win it hands down...

I have to say I too was just waiting for the final pages: please take me out back and put a bullet in me. So painful. One of the most meandering and futile series I've ever read. Utterly, utterly frustrating.

One commenter takes umbrage with reading through to the end of the series if even the first book was a problem: to that, I take issue. I like Gregory Benford and with each novel I was hoping for some amazing new discovery. Sadly by the end I was laughing to myself as I flipped through pages of vague tensions and too-dense descriptions of things that I can barely imagine.

I frankly could not possibly care less what happens to clan Bishop; I did like Nigel though & wish I could have seen more of him and what he did. Also the Myriapodia.

As a few other reviewers have noted, this is really an epic tale, fantastic in its scope - but not in its execution.

So, if you've read the first four, you might as well read the last one. It's not pretty, but: it at least is the end!

The first two novels of the series were excellent, the middle two so-so, the fifth mediocre, and this last one would be completely dreadful were it not for the need to complete the series. The novel reads more like a disjointed collection of random adventures than a cohesive work. It's hard to be mentally or emotionally invested in a work when there's no rhyme or reason why anything is happening. I'll give you an example -- Toby spends part of the novel as a river guide... a river guide? why? it makes no sense. Usually I have no trouble visualizing even the most fantastic science fiction, but this one I found hard to take in the imagery. On the plus side, we get a large dose of Nigel Walmsley, the hero of the (excellent) first two novels of the series. The bad part is, like Toby and Killeen he's just doing seemingly random things. Like the 'esty' and black hole that Benford describes, the novel itself suffers from a disconnection of cause and effect. Maybe the novel itself was sucked into a black hole and spit out the other side. I really wanted this novel to be good, but it wasn't. bummer.

Gregory Benford is a smart guy. It shows. The problem is when he tries to show us just how smart he is. This book shouldnt be approached unless the reader is armed with a Ph.D in astro physics. Benford introduces the concept of an esty, and although central to the plot and events of the novel, Benford does a bad job of making the etsy (is it a time? place? neither?) comprehensible to the average reader.

Also, the book isnt helped by the way Benford devotes entire chapters to events and characters, who are memorable only for the degree to which they turn out to be irrelevant. A very disapointing end to a very promising series.

SAILING BRIGHT ETERNITY by Gregory Benford is the conclusion of a series that failed to live up to its jacket blurb. Reading 50 or so pages in, I stopped because of boredom. Initially, I thought the series might be like Robert Heinlein Lazarus Long books, which I enjoyed back in the '60's and '70's. No way. The jacket praises the "hard science," which I saw as totally speculative far futurism. The use of a chimera of hard science detracted so much from the action of what I read, I couldn't go on. The conversations were minimal and hard to follow. My suggestion is that if you haven't read Heinlein's STRANGER IN A STRANGELAND, read it first. Then go to the first of Benford's series. To be somewhat fair, it is possible that had I done that, I would have been drawn in and at least read the whole first novel of the series.

Whilst there's a nugget of a satisfying conclusion to the rest of the series here, the editor should be fired for not expunging at least 1/3 to 1/2 of what ended up between the covers of this book. Besides the needlessly shoehorned speculative science and the dread dreary zombies and riverboat and a couple of other sections, the high-concept stuff gets seriously weakened by over-prodding. If you're going to have aliens which are beyond our comprehension, be aware that if you write their dialog, it will be coming from a human mind.

And how many times do we have to be told about how matter deforms spacetime so spacetime can be deformed to simulate matter in the form of the esty? It seemed like it was twice a chapter at one point (And the chapters are short)