Customer Reviews

The Space Eater

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

 

 

A surprisngly good read. I bought this as one of perhaps fifty scifi paperbacks at a used bookstore; it was good enough to make me go and look up what else he's written. (Rather a lot, it turns out.) Just good scifi.

Langford had a long career as a professional physicist, and this shows in the convincing physics he puts on display in this fast-moving, thought-provoking tale. At the same time, he wears his expertise lightly: the reader is never stifled by the science, nor struggling to comprehend it. Very few authors get this balance right, but Langford does it perfectly ... and tells a rollicking good tale into the bargain. Highly recommended.

Excellent writing with great details, from gruesome first-person deaths to tricky situations that reminded me of the great dilemmas Asimov would set up in the Foundation series (which constitutes about 1/3 of the sci-fi i've read ;) I'm not sure if certain small, insignificant parts were confusing, or if i was just sleep-deprived. Either way, i couldn't stop reading and finished it in 2 days.

The idea of regeneration works well in this scenario. Forced to live, the two heroes of this novel are forced to carry out the wishes of the " mature " earth society. The earth, however, had not anticipated on them being many light years away....

The Space Eater reads like a dimestore scifi comic. The realism is non-existent (Novas that took place recently are somehow instantly visible in the Earth's night sky, humans can be regenerated with memories and personalities intact from DNA, etc.)

Still, if you are LOOKING for a comic-book style novel, you should probably gain some amusement from this one.