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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Truly Original and Distinctive British Science Fiction,
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The Egg-Shaped Thing is a mysterious atomic device developed in England by an East Bloc scientist long vanished. Powered by radiation from external sources, it has effects on local spacetime that are never quite fully detailed but the book will leave you wondering and remembering decades later. When I threw out all my old boxes of books in preparation for moving out of the country this is one of the very few I kept. A memorable read with a captivating and spooky twist and as lingering as "MacBeth."
Any time after you read this you note the time as being 4:31 I guarantee you will be creeped out.
2.0 out of 5 stars
An egg-shaped story,
By
This review is from: The egg-shaped thing (Hardcover)
I obtained this book at a flea market, never having heard of either the title or author before. Hodder-Williams was a member of the Depressing English Science Fiction Writers school, which counted among its members such esteemed names as John Wyndham ("Day of the Triffids"), J.G. Ballard ("The Crystal World") and, more recently, Ian Watson ("The Jonah Kit"). If you liked their books, you will probably like Hodder-Williams' work. I don't, and I didn't.
The book is a first-person narrative by James Fulbright, an engineer whose startup company has been crushed by industrial giants for reasons he cannot understand, because, as a friend reminds him he told his psychiatrist, "It hasn't happened yet." Getting up to fix a dripping faucet one night, he goes out on a neighbor's roof (conveniently one of the giants who crushed him) to investigate a howling cat and... something nasty happens: he finds a windowless concrete bunker, next to it a cat's collar "revealing a desperate lack of cat." As inexplicable coincidence is heaped upon inexplicable coincidence, it slowly dawns upon the hapless Fulbright that he is being sucked into the machinations of a group of renegade Los Alamos physicists who want to tamper with relativity and quantum physics for reasons that are never made clear except that they can get a government grant to do so. Because this is the Depressing school of English science-fiction writers, their experiments are (of course!) doomed to fail in an acutely horrible way. This could have been an interesting novel, but Hodder-Williams writes in a choppy, rushed style, which never gives his characters or his ominous situations a chance to develop. The awkward plot relies far too heavily upon outrageous coincidences, which might work given the idea of warping reality if we really understood what was going on, but we don't. Hodder-Williams' message seems to be that science is bad because it gives us power, and power, as we all know, ultimately corrupts. It's not so much science-fiction as a rather simplistic morality play with a hint of science-fiction flavoring added. Altogether, an unsatisfying read, valuable largely as a historical artifact.
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