The Last Theorem Flash Review

 A couple of weeks ago, I was wandering around my local library, and saw a book by Arthur C. Clarke!  "My goodness," I thought to myself, "I've read the first two Rama books, and I think the second Odyssey book (or had I only seen the first two movies?), and they were great!  Let's check it out!

When I picked up the book, I saw it was co-authored by Frederik Pohl.  Well, I haven't read any Pohl, but he's certainly a big name in science fiction.  I was beside myself with anticipation.

Without spoiling anything, I will say that I am surprised at how carelessly written the book is.  We find an incorrect count of the free tetrominoes (something you will know if you ever played Tetris), a scientist with a wealth of information at his fingertips and absurdly unsure of what to do (my God, if I was a theorist and you threw me into a library with unlimited journal access I would never be bored), a straight-up mistake in understanding how energy is stored in chemical bonds (waved away as "somebody figured it out" in the story, whatever that means--my least favorite handwave), a failure to remember that deceleration by ion drive will generally take as long as the acceleration did (years to get to 0.9c, a few days to slow down), and bizarre behavior by several different alien species (I don't expect authors to necessarily understand what the function of money is but it was still bad).

I cannot definitively put this carelessness at Pohl's feet, but I will say that the Rama books were written with great care, though it may be that Clarke's attention to detail changed over the years.  Who knows?  I'll have to read some more of both authors to get a better feel.

I will also say this:  you, the author of a science fiction story, should never appear to be self-congratulatory.  It is not your job to fluff up the reader's impression of you, it is your job to draw the reader into your story.  And when your self-fluffing is as careless as this, even a casual reader might pick up on it.

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If you like hard science fiction, you might enjoy my book Missed Contact! It's the story of a salvage team tasked with figuring out why a group of scientists seem to have vanished from a newly-surveyed planet.

It's a fun story with a hard-ish sci-fi setting, but there's a lot of mystery as well. It's actually the second novella in what I call the Derelict Project universe, which is a collection of stories in a unique sci-fi setting. My first book, The Hyacinth Rescue (with its awful hand-drawn--by 2013 me--cover), features the same salvage team, and my short Jade Cargo tentatively occurs in the same universe. 

If you check them out, I hope you enjoy them!