Customer Reviews

Starplex

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Sawyer's foray into space opera and space adventure is a fun book to read, but lacks the depth of (human) characterization and philosophical thought that are the strengths of his later works. The book's strengths include
1. the Ib Race -- a brilliant construct
2. the dark matter entities
3. the enigmatic glass man
4. the tightly woven plot threads
5. an interesting twist on the gateway concept

The book's weaknesses include
1. a weak protagonist
2. too many "Star Trek"-like devices (tractor beams, force fields)
3. uneven treatment of the human-Walhal (the pig creatures) dynamics.

Unlike many of the (harsh) negative critics below, I found the book quite enjoyable, even if there is some hand-waving here and there. It's not like that hasn't been done before in SF. And just to set the matter straight, Sawyer does NOT imply that laser beams are visible (he clearly states that the computer animated the laser fire in a holographic display) and he does not say that a spaceship swerves to avoid direct laser fire; what he does say is that a spaceship maneuvers to avoid another, spinning spaceship which happens to be firing a laser.

The book is enjoyable science fiction. The key word in this phrase is fiction.

I saw a web site on the use of sci-fi to teach astronomy at the university level that said this book dealt with more cosmological concepts than any other sci-fi work, and dealt with them well. (I don't think Amazon allows URLs, but try a search on 'teaching astronomy science fiction'). I can only agree. I follow the cosmological literature quite closely and Sawyers' book is a first rate summation of all the issues currently vexing cosmologists ... wrapped up with action-adventure and fun characters and aliens.

Robert J. Sawyer won the 2003 Hugo Award for Best Novel of the Year for HOMINIDS. That win was well-deserved but I got to wondering how far back in his career he was writing award-caliber books before he snared the "Big One." The answer is: at least THIS far back. STARPLEX was the only 1996 novel to be both a best-novel Hugo Award finalsit and best-novel Nebula Award finalist (and it won Canada's Aurora Award and the Compuserve HOmer Award). Sawyer's aliens are every bit as good as those of James White, Larry Niven, Hal Clement and Robert Forward, and his people are infinitely more complex and believable than any written by those writers. This book tackles just about every problem in astrophysics ... and solves them all. No wonder its on numerous university astronomy reading lists, and endorsed by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. A terrific book well worth tracking down.

Frankly, I'm surprised at some of the reviews of this book. It looks as if some people just want to attack this poor man. This book is great! The aliens are very original, and their physical appearances differ more from humans than a couple of forehead wrinkles(a la Star Trek). Also, their personalities are different enough from humans that you can tell they are aliens, but not so different that you can't identify with them. The book is well written, and the plot is very good. It has multiple twists and turns that leads to a surprising ending. Trust me, if you see this book and like good science fiction, BUY IT! You're doing yourself a favor.

I have enjoyed a few of Sawyer's later works(Frameshift,Factoring Humanity)but this earlier work was far better. The characterizations are good which is the usual for Sawyer. But more than that, I enjoyed the background of the alien races and found the story intiguing. My only complaint was that I thought the end of the story was a little too much; Sawyer didn't need to make the events of the story to be THAT important. It was already a good enough book, it didn't need any more.

I have nothing but praise for Sawyer and I find him one of the best Science Fiction writers ever! However, this book was a major letdown, lacking the interesting characters and intriguing plots of some of his other books. Also, in other books, Sawyer does a far superior job explaining complex science. In this book he makes the scientific explanations difficult to follow unless you happen to be Stephen Hawking.

The plot itself reminds me of a long episode of Star Trek TNG. You have the starship searching the galaxy with both human and alien crewmen united by a planet Commonwealth (did you say Federation?). They ultimately must save the galaxy by the book's end.

This the second book by Sawyer I have read and I enjoyed both. The first was 'Calculating God'. Starplex was mostly hard SF but with some interesting philosophical ideas. Although Starplex seems like basic hard SF, even leaning towards space opera on the surface, it's also develops some big ideas about the universe and origin of life.

Robert J. Sawyer's book "Starplex" was one of the most entertaining, thought-provoking, and mind-twisting books I've read in a long time.

To begin, Sawyer is an excellent writer. Plotting, dialogue, and human drama aspects are all well-represented here. He also never loses sight of using humor, awe (in its truest sense), human limitations, and philosophical twists to create realities that are at once far, far away, yet understandable.

I'm sure Robert J. Sawyer has his critics - every writer does. Bottom line here, though, is that Sawyer has created his own voice with which to tell great stories (science fiction and otherwise), and Starplex is one of his best.

(From Nova Express V4N4) I'll be blunt: Robert J. Sawyer's Starplex is a remarkably bad science fiction novel. It has serious deficiencies in style, tone, plotting, characterization, logic, and extrapolative rigor. Though not unremittingly awful, Starplex has such huge and obvious flaws that publication in its current form calls into question the editing competency at both Ace Books and Analog (where it was serialized). That it garnered both Hugo and Nebula nominations is no credit to the science fiction community. Gardner Dozois once said that when many people asked for more "hard science fiction" in Asimov's, what they actually meant was "stories as close to Star Trek as possible." Anyone with such a prejudice may well enjoy Starplex. Though not as elegant a design as the Enterprise, the bridge scenes in Starplex bear a strong resemblance to TV's most famous SF show. There is even an illustration of where everybody sits on said bridge (though neither it, nor the diagram of the ship, are necessary). The characterization is barely adequate for Campbellian science fiction, much less work in the 1990s. It's been said that many an aspiring writer takes the injunction to "write what you know" entirely too seriously, resulting in numerous bad novels about English professors contemplating adultery. Having a starship captain (excuse me, "director") contemplating adultery is hardly an improvement. Indeed, apart from contemplating adultery (which others have informed me is something of a theme in Sawyer's other books), the only other character trait Lansing betrays beyond the standard issue "competent yet compassionate" template (though he acts far more like the assistant dean of the English department at a small midwestern college than someone who should be running a starship) is a veiled dislike for Waldahudins, left over from his best friend getting waxed during a first contact gone wrong. This latter trait seems to exist so that you can see he's overcome it by novel's end in a scene where high-level Earth government personnel act like bloodthirsty morons so we can all see our hero's moral superiority. It's about as subtle as the writer jumping up and yelling "Look! He's grown!" The Waldahudins are neither convincing nor interesting as a race, and they seem to exist mainly to provide the novel's heavies. The Ibs are more believably delineated, and Sawyer has put a good deal more thought and innovation into their construction than the Waldahudins. Despite living 640 years, Ibs find wasting time abhorrent, and in the book's most powerful scene, Boxcar, the most sympathetic of the Ibs, "discorporates" as punishment for the crime of wasting others' time it committed long ago. Though not on par with science fiction's most memorable aliens, say Octavia Butler's Oankali or Vernor Vinge's Tines, Sawyer's Ibs are a good, solid, professional effort. Likewise, the scenes where Starplex makes contact with the darmats (using mathematics) are effectively handled, even if the communication technique is at least as old as Stanley G. Weinbaum's classic "A Martian Odyssey" from 1934. Even if they owe a nod to Star Trek, the action scenes, both during the green sun's appearance and during the attack, are well handled and reasonably gripping (though the winning battle tactic is stolen outright from David Brin's Startide Rising). Sawyer has obvious skill at handling the interactions of characters in tense situations. However, the book's scientific nadir probably comes during those same scenes, when one of Starplex's dolphin-piloted craft fires a laser, and the enemy ship "swerved to avoid contact with the beam." Neat trick, that, swerving to avoid something moving at the speed of light. (And, for that matter, just how does a ship "swerve" in space? And just how would you be able to see a laser beam in vacuum?) Unfortunately, Starplex suffers from huge lapses of logic and common sense all throughout the novel, with people doing things in impossibly short periods of time. For example, after it gets fried by the new sun's radiation, the entire lower half of the ship (all 34 floors of it) is detached and a replacement put on in a mere 18 hours. (I wish I could have gotten my transmission fixed that quickly.) Let's see, they need to remove the old sections (quite a task in and of itself) without damaging the interlocks linking it to the rest of the ship; repair any damage to the remaining portions; pressurize and leak check the new section; mate it with the ship; make sure all the interlocks are working; ensure all internal and external airlocks and bulkhead are sealed tight (especially since a single leak could result in death for the crew-a more likely schedule is for the safety checks themselves to take at least a day and probably more); hookup, troubleshoot, and configure the electronics and electrical systems, not to mention a dozen other things that would have to be done in order to ready and flightcheck a starship that's undergone a major overhaul. And all this in zero gee. Even with the full benefits of industrious Ibs working around the clock, and without the foreknowledge of how tedious and difficult it has been to do far simpler zero-gee repairs on Mir, a few moments of thought brings the inevitable conclusion that replacing half of a starship in 18 hours is not just unlikely, but downright absurd. An equally absurd condensation of time occurs at the beginning of the battle, when Lansing orders his crew to find anything remotely resembling a weapon and have them mounted on the outside of their probeships in a grand total of fifteen minutes. Now, think this through. They're going to: a.) remove a laser from its current mounting bracket; b.) adjust its focal length and power output to work in a way it was never designed for; c.) take it down to the probeship bay; d.) mount it to the outside of the ship; e.) string power hookups from the ship's system to the newly mounted lasers; and f.) hook up communications (wireless, since only a complete idiot would start drilling holes in a vacuum-sealed spacecraft hull), complete with a targeting system, between the probeship control system and the laser. And remember, this is for not just one, but five ships. In fifteen minutes. One gets the impression that Mr. Sawyer has never had to swap out a hard drive or change an oil filter. The tragedy is, these particular lapses could have been corrected with good editing, or even a few CYA paragraphs to paper over some of the more gaping plot and logic holes. However, no amount of editing is able to save Starplex from one of its central absurdities. The entire Waldahudin war plotline stems from their worry over Earth's economic superiority because Waldahudins don't believe in mass manufacturing. Why? Because they "never build two things the same" because doing so would be "an affront to the God of Artisans." The problem is, a race with such a belief would never develop an industrial society, much less a starfaring civilization. The problem is, such a race could never make (nor program) computer chips, since they are ALL prdicated on the notion of doing the same thing the exact same way. But the absurdity dosn't end there. A few of the other things it is prohibitively expensive or impossible to manufacture one at a time include light bulbs, metal cans, hypodermic needles, staples, ball bearings(!), and even screws and nails. Hell, in Waldahudin society, even candle molds would be anathema. Yet we're to believe they've achieved starflight. The are other dramatic flaws in logic, extrapolation, and construction. The prose is flat at best and at worst is quite clumsy. Nanotechnology is mentioned, then immediately dropped without any explanation (or evidence) of its effect on society. The helmsman is a redheaded Norseman named Thor (not exactly a page out of The Subtle Art of Characterization). Except for some of the prominent used scenery of interstellar SF, almost no new scientific or social developments seem to have come down the pike since our time, allowing the central characters of this one ship to solve nearly all the outstanding problems of astrophysics (including the location of dark matter, the spiral shape of galaxies, and-as an added bonus-the origin and fate of the universe). Indeed, the subtitle could be "How I won an intergalactic war, discovered a new alien race, solved the greatest scientific mysteries of my day, and got to be a billion-year-old immortal without cheating on my wife." Despite all the forgoing, Starplex is not unrelievedly bad. Sawyer clearly has the desire and instinct for engaging the big "sense of wonder" issues at the heart of science fiction. However, the novel displays a distressing lack of basic technical competence, especially for a work so celebrated. It is very possible that Sawyer's subsequent novels (he's published at least two since this came out) are better, and even Starplex, in the hands of a good editor, could have been hammered into acceptable shape. However, in its current form, it should never have been published.

Starplex is good as Hawking, Wheeler, and Thorne. Rob Sawyer's gedanken experiments on dark matter, wormholes, black holes, time travel, etc. are as good as those of any theoretical physicist alive today. And he writes the best science fiction there is today, to explain things we may never truly understand, but shall forever enjoy thinking about.