Customer Reviews

Total Eclipse

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

 

 

This novel was well written, in the style usually favored by Mr. Brunner. There is almost no description of the surroundings or the background of the characters, except Ian, so that is why the novel is about 200 pages.

The most interesting precept in this book is that an human could get to think like an alien under the right circumstances. This passage is very well done.

They finally understand how a civilization was wiped out and you will see that this future could happen to us if we are not vigilant toward the biogeneticians.

Greed is a part of our nature, so we must put every effort in our reasonning.

What a great story. These scientist are left to solve the mystery of a dead civilization and in the end they do, but for what. They are stranded and no one knows what they learned along with what lesson they learned about greed. They try and establish a life for themselves on this world but fate has another plan. And in the end their attempt at a new civilization on this planet is thwarted by, perhaps, the greed of man on their own home world.

Though this may be my ninth Brunner novel to date, the author still manages to surprise me with his unending repertoire of imagination, science and, most surprisingly, humanity. A science fiction novel with the title `Total Eclipse' doesn't exactly ring a novelty bell of sorts, but beyond the so-so peel hides a surprisingly rich fruit.

`Sigma Draconis, nineteen light-years from Earth, had once harbored a world with a high civilization. But that world had died and only certain mysterious artifacts remained - wonderful creations but just one of each kind. By the year 2028, humanity was facing its own final crisis. And the starship STELLARIS was sent to find out the cause of that neighboring race's extinction. If they could discover why, it might mean saving our own world from a similar disaster.'

The only habitable planet within reach of Earth happens to also be home to a myriad scattering of similar structures and cloned crystal memory devices. With a deluge of possible hypotheses of the de-evolution of the mollusk-like species or of the fatal flaw of the same peoples, the thirty-some team of experts try to understand the undoing of an entire species. Each solution is ingenious, each explanation is conceivable.

Just when the plot becomes to feel rather tedious with the unrelenting speculative answers, Brunner takes it up a notch a pulls in a rather ominous mood thereby changing the characters' outlook and even the ominous conclusion to the novel. The eleventh-hour plot is wrenched with emotional onuses which is unlike many of Brunner novels which tend to have a straight forward conclusion.

Total Eclipse has nothing to do with a solar eclipse at all, but the reader must read into the plot unreeling and discover what the title means to the novel and to humanity in general.

Although published in 1974, I'd never gotten around to reading this, and now that I have, I'm sorry. It's among the most depressing novels I've ever read, which, coupled with its muddled presentation, makes me wonder if I should bother with anything else he's written.

To be sure, I prefer the BEM type of science fiction, and the possibility that the dead species ("Draconians") inhabiting Sigma Draconis would be interesting as aliens was what drove me to persist in reading this introverted, self-conscious story. Some authors have no vision of humanity's expansion and physical conquest of the stars, and perhaps they are correct. But I prefer hope and the possibilities of such, and Brunner apparently did not.

In brief, the story is of dysfunctional humanity, possibly on its own last legs in reaching out to the stars, depositing one last research group on Sigma Draconis, who work out that the Draconians died out...became extinct...because of their improbable business practices and medium of exchange, which Brunner brutally correlates to a kind of selfishness in analogy with Earth-based entrepreneurism ("capitalism", with a barb). When the expected return of the Stellis, humanity's single star-ship, fails to occur, the population of researchers at first attempts to become colonists, but quickly dies off, never having contacted or heard from Earth again. Thus ends the book, with the primary character dying as he writes an epitaph, and ending with I -

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in a style worthy of a pretty good high school writer. Depressing? I have a hard time understanding what it was like being John Brunner.

In 1974, anyone writing about computers would now appear far behind the times, and Brunner seems a bit better than some with speculations about their capabilities, although he has people "programming" the most abstruse queries imaginable in a matter of a few hours, and it was hard to believe he'd ever really considered what a program was. He posits a civilization that rose from animal to full consciousness in a mere 100 Kyr (picture Lucy to I Love Lucy in just 1000 centuries rather than 20,000), and presents a philosophical viewpoint that hopefully died out with Aristotle (that mere thinking could imagine all reality), and (ab)uses it for an allegorical purpose that achieves, in my view, little more than the abnegation of human striving.

Some folks writing here seem to believe that anyone winning a Hugo must be a great writer, and that therefor whatever their output, it must be respected, if not admired. I don't agree. Brunner seems, in at least this novel, soured on life, soured on humanity (we'd be OK, if only we were completely different), a pessimist.

Perhaps it was only a story, and Mr. Brunner simply wrote it down until he was done. My own wish is that, having done that, he'd let it moulder away in a file of unpublished work.

Sending humans to a remote, but habitable world to study the mysterious collapse of a super-intelligent race of "Draconians" should have produced riveting fare. Instead, we get a rather plodding, often boring, account of some disfunctional, but not very interesting, people. Ian is our hero, if there is such a thing, but he's anti-social and not very likeable, and not in the good way. He and the ragtag band of scientists dig thru debris and detritis on this foreign world, but perhaps it's just a representation of the same refuse that they left behind on Earth and ultimately it just seems to represent that we'll all end up in the same place. As far as sci-fi goes, this one is pretty uneventful and at its core, it's just not very intriguing or interesting. The writing was okay. The dialogue didn't induce involuntary cringing, but the story moved along at a Draconian pace. There's too much out there to waste your time on what is essentially a mediocre tale with a message lost in space.

John Brunner weaves a haunting tale of how thirty people attack the nearly insuperable very good copy of this rare booktask of unriddling the mysteries of a long-buried culture. Was it a fatal virus, an internecine war, a religion of lunatic brutality, or a deleterious mutation that destroyed an entire civilization? And when the riddle is finally unravelled will it provide a solution to human problems? Will the answer reach Earth in time?

In the year 2020, an international space team, exploring Sigma Draconis, nineteen light years from earth, discovers the remains of a highly advanced society that has left behind as its most spectacular artifact the largest telescope imaginable.