Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Clever SF Ideas, Really Big Dumb Objects, Solid, not Great, December 11, 2000
The versatile and prolific Robert Reed is back with Marrow, a big novel about what is sometimes called a BDO, or Big Dumb Object. The BDO in this case is a huge spaceship, the size of Jupiter. Humans happen across it, and find it empty of life. They claim it, and turn it into a sort of tourist attraction: almost a cruise ship for cruising the Galaxy. Many separate species are hosted on the Ship, the passengers sometimes using the Ship to travel from star system to star system, but other times staying on for centuries or millennia, even joining the Ship's crew. The crew itself consists of a diverse variety of modified humans, including the Remoras, who live on the outside and repair the Ship's shell, and who have adapted to a lifetime spent in spacesuits; as well as the Captains, essentially immortal (like most humans), able to survive any injury that doesn't vaporize the head. The Master Captain has been with the Ship from its discovery, some 100,000 years. In all this time, nothing significant has been learned about the mysterious Builders of the Ship, or about the Ship's original purpose.But a great new discovery has been made: there is a strange, iron, world at the very core of the Ship. This world is named Marrow, and a picked crew of the Ship's best Captains, including the Master's right-hand woman, Miocene, and a very talented Captain called Washen, are assigned to find a way to reach Marrow, and to explore it. With great difficulty, they manufacture a path down to the surface of Marrow, only to find it destroyed soon after they reach the surface. Thus begins a 5000 year effort to find a way back to the ship: and even that is only part of the action, as the plot takes numerous twists and turns, and several ideas are advance to explain Marrow and the Ship: all culminating in an action-filled conclusion. The "Neat Idea" content of this book is impressive indeed. The Ship itself is a cool notion, and so is Marrow. Such inventions as the Remoras are also very fine, as are several of the alien species on the Ship. The plot drags a bit in the center portion, the long period spent on Marrow, but it is resolved pretty well, and with lots of excitement. There is a certain way in which things are almost too big, almost exhausting, and almost easy, in a way. This is a particular problem when considering the characters, Miocene and Washen and the others, who live for millennia but seem much like contemporary people. The magical tech which allows them to survive almost anything seems overconvenient at times, as well. But that's pretty much what you get when trying to consider such huge concepts: the characters are dwarfed, and so too are our usual standards for action and danger. For the most part, Reed delivers on the promises of this book: he promises Big Cool Ideas, and Action, and a satisfying resolution with at least something of an explanation for it all, and by and large, that's what Marrow has. It isn't fully successful, or fully involving on the character level, but it's pretty good.
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13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
It Doesn't Really Get to the Heart of Things, September 10, 2001
This was an engrossing book with a lot of potential. I would give it 2.5 stars as it was fun to read and made me want to keep coming back throughout- there were no boring parts or places where the text dragged. There were constant changes and new unexpected developments. Particularly the final 2 pages are nothing of what I would expect. I wish I could comment on them without inserting major spoilers. Who would expect major cosmology from a simple science fiction work?
Now the caveats. The extremely long lives of the characters, described as near eternal, makes them very difficult to relate to. I am not eternal, least this side of death, and I know very few people who are. It is surprising for all of their developments that these eternals couldn't progress more spiritually and emotionally. They remained actually at a rather infantile psychological stage throughout their hundreds of thousands of years.
Secondly, the author's lack of thoroughness was irritating. Numerous grammatical mistakes were interspersed with plot continuity errors. I found myself a number of times suddenly totally lost as to how things had changed and come to this point, and would look back through the last few pages, only to discover there was no proper build-up to explain plot development or location. Similarly the technology, such as hyperfiber, is totally mysterious and even magical. Indeed, it is not until the near the end of the book when one finally hears a character share the nature of hyperfiber- only to be told that it has to do with quantum flux and otherwise, the characters don't understand it themselves! Most seriously, the summation is sudden and contrived. After so many pages of build up, everything comes together finally in a way that makes one wonder why it couldn't have come together that way all along. Even the metaphysical underpinnings of the entire ship, though very interesting and ingenious, are introduced simply as supposition which is then accepted as fact, without any explanation as to how the characters came up with these realizations. It reminded me of Star Trek Original Series episodes when Spock would offer a possible hypothesis, and then everyone would immediately assume that this hypothesis was in fact Truth.
All this said, I would still recommend reading it- I was unable to put it down. Fun, pulp, fiction. But not anything to turn the world upside down with.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Stands on its own, if you like audacity, October 17, 2000
Okay, first an editorial comment: I hate it when people review books on the basis of superficial resemblences to other works. This may have a big world ship, but that's where the resemblence to Rama ends, folks (nor was Rama the first: Heinlein's Universe, anyone?) -- if you want another Rama book, you should direct your comments to Clarke and Lee.Now, if you can get past that, this is a work that has, I think, a genuinely audacious storyline. Perhaps TOO audacious for some tastes. We are talking about a storyline with hundred-thousand year old characters who are entirely willing to, among other things, wait five-thousand years (building an entire civilization in the process) in order to rescue themselves from being marooned. The story is certainly an example of that grand old genre known as Space Opera. The science may be a tad "harder" than the old E.E. "Doc" Smith books, but only a tad. The sweep is epic and the characters are (quite literally) superhuman. People who are looking for either fine characterization or for hard technical science really should look elsewhere, because it ain't that sort of book. But if you can read it for what it is (especially if you are a fan of the old genre), I think that it stands up quite well. Certainly, it's not the perfect story -- the characters could have been rendered better, and the resolution seemed a bit forced -- but it is a GOOD example of what it is. The book only "fails" if one judges it on the basis of what is not. At least that's my (not all that humble) opinion.
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