White Light (Mass Market Paperback)

by William Barton (Author), Michael Capobianco (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist
This combination of hard science and fantasy should appeal to fans of such writers as Larry Niven and Robert J. Sawyer. The story--a group of interstellar explorers, searching for a new home for humanity, winds up in a place that might be heaven--is well told, and its characters, two families forced to get much closer than they ever intended to, are engaging enough to hold reader interest through the occasional passage where nothing much seems to be happening. The novel's only drawback is the bafflingly excessive and seemingly gratuitous use of profanity. On the other hand, the story itself, a smart exploration of the concept of heaven, is consistently interesting. Readers willing to look past the language will find a rich, intelligent tale well worth reading. David Pitt --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

From Kirkus Reviews
Another wide-ranging, medium-future science fiction yarn from the authors of Alpha Centauri (1997), etc. By the end of the 21st century, nuclear war has wiped out most of the Earth apart from the US; a few brave souls, meanwhile, are exploring the galaxy in hyperspace starships. For a routine scientific mission, fate brings together a quarrelsome and uncomfortable bunch of characters: pilot and compulsive womanizer Wolf O'Malley and his two lovers, housekeeper Honoria Surez and flight engineer Thalia Jansky; Honoria's teenage daughter, the alluring Cory; Thalia's husband, bureaucrat Mark Porringer, and her son Stu McCray. After approaching a UFO, they fall through a star gate and end up among the Pleiades, only to meet the nonorganic alien BeauHun, who report that the universe is rapidly being engulfed by an entity called the Topopolis. Like the BeauHun and many other species, humans can survive only by becoming vermin within the Topopolis. Helpfully, the Beauflun redesign their ship and install the machine-intelligence TrackTrixCom to navigate through the Topopolis. After various adventures (they flee from a RipWrapper but are grabbed by a PacketWight and lose their ship), the group eventually arrivesstill bickering, angry, and resentfulat a vast construct, Galaxios, home to still more aliens and many human types deriving from other probability worlds. All agree to attempt communication with the Topopolis, but to do this they must enter Heaven and confront God. Stunningly imaginative, but with a constant, boorish sexual whine and characters who range from largely unsympathetic to outright nasty: whether metaphor, joke, or misdirected mind-boggler, it sets the teeth on edge. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Avon Books; First Thus edition (August 3, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0380795167
• ISBN-13: 978-0380795161
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 0.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,193,292 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Entirely too much sex, August 26, 1999

By A Customer

I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks that the characters in this book spend entirely too much time thinking about sex. I'm not a prude; it's just that it seemed completely out of context.

They make first contact with aliens; they think about sex. They find themselves on an inexplicable, incomprehensible landscape; they think about sex. They fear imminent death; they think about sex. They meet God; they think about sex.

This seems at first to be a brutal view of human nature, but later it becomes downright bizarre. Even chimpanzees who find themselves in a completely alien place and have no idea how they got there wouldn't think about sex five minutes later, but these characters do.

The characters sound interesting - an intelligent woman, her 14-year-old son, a chauvanist pig, a regular guy, a young girl, and her older, wiser mother. Nevertheless, they all have just one thing on their minds.

In case your curiositiy is piqued, no, this isn't an erotic novel. If it was, all of this would make sense. Instead, it's as if the cast of a bad porno movie was suddenly transported into what would have otherwise been a fascinating SF novel.

In a twist of plot at the beginning of the story, the characters are forced to start their journey without the team of scientists they planned to bring. I'm afraid all of the truly interesting and intelligent characters missed the boat.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Starts out with magnificent potential, but fails to satisfy, November 29, 1998

By	Todd Drashner ([e-mail]) (Norfolk, Virginia, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: White Light (Paperback)

Like the author's previous works, White Light examines the human condition against a backdrop of ideas of the grandest scale. Unfortunately, in this instance it feels like the authors have lost control. The characters are one dimensional, able to only focus on wanting sex, having sex or reacting to the consequences of wanting/having sex. The main feeling you have for them is that they all need serious therapy. This against a background that is awesome in its scope and vision, although the effect is diluted considerably since we are given no real explanation for what we are seeing, why it is happening or why it is important. The main effect is that the authors raided their idea files and threw everything into the pot. The characters travel across the universe, encounter cosmic engineering, alternate universes, the Tiplerian Omega Point and ultimately Heaven and God and the only thing they ever think about is who's sleeping with whom. The characters are too twisted to relate to and the background to confused to do more than frustrate me. I closed the book feeling disappointed and frustrated.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars I was deeply disappointed in the quality of this book., August 13, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: White Light (Paperback)

As an avid Science Fiction reader I was surprised in the quality of White Light after some of the reviews I read. The characters were never developed. The story itself was extremely disjointed. It seemed that that the authors had creative ideas and tried to bring them together but cared nothing about the fact that it became absurd. One final observation was about the excessive sex involved. At first you could see the connection and it did help in understanding the characters. Later it became obviously overdone and borderline comical. I have never disliked a book more.