Joshua T. Calvert
about 100k words
Why did I read it?
-Best seller in hard sci-fi, doing market research for my own stuff
Overall picture?
-Unfortunately, found it rather bland and not engaging
-First 30% of book is about tracking The Object
-Second 30% is about getting ready to go to The Object and flying there
-Third 30% is about their time on The Object
-Made me recall nostalgically Rendezvous with Rama
-I re-read Rama and will make some comparisons throughout the review
Main character is all right, but Calvert spends too much time having her be an influencer rather than having her interact with/speculate about the science
Most other characters are pretty forgettable
Mel is MC, story mostly told from her perspective
Despite this, story written in consistent 3rd person, very little insight into other characters’ thoughts
In Rama, a few characters are reasonably well-developed (even though names are forgettable), Commander, bicycle guy, Mercury people, Space Jesus guy, scientist on Luna...
Much of The Object is engineering, not hard sci-fi—only a couple of relatively interesting sci-fi ideas present
-What The Object actually is
-Method for instantaneous communication
Rama is relatively speaking, full of ideas, like General Tso’s Chicken.
-Superchimps
-Planetary alliance
-Mercury colony
-Architecture of Rama (staircases, layout, activation)
-Spaceguard
-Low-G air-bike sport
-Hints of societal organization—planned families, polygamy, Malthusian population control
-Space Drive
Part of the problem with The Object is that it’s near-future/contemporary sci-fi, which makes it harder to do sweeping futurism, but that’s only a partial excuse
-could have had The Object do more things and more mysterious things on its path
-could have had more linkage of the instant comms idea throughout the story
-could have had more scientific questioning about the nature/actions of The Object
-could have had more creative ideas for intercepting spacecraft
Character interactions are dry/bland when they aren’t obnoxious
-Dry/bland in the sense that there’s very little emotional back-and-forth
-Obnoxious astronaut quiz
-Recite textbook answers to questions of wildly varying difficulty in ways no human would recite them—verbatim from textbook using ridiculous vocabulary
-Characters in Rama disagree, have interpersonal problems, hide things from each other, etc.
The Object has almost no actual arguments about what their observations might be
-Show 10 scientists something they’ve never seen before and ask them to explain it, and you might not get 10 different answers, but you might get six
-Lots of argument and speculation in Rama
-Behind Saturn event is incredibly poorly handled
The Object spends a ton of time on engineering minutia, very little on actually intriguing things
-Prep/training for astronauts is detailed but pretty boring
-Landing on The Object is too vague and not well-described
-Water cutter in vacuum? How does that work? Would like to know.
-The Object does something much faster than it should be able to, and nobody is watching
-What The Object really is is a neat idea
-Other fresh idea is for instantaneous communication and is pretty boring in presentation, only really comes into play at the very end, no exploration of what such communication would do
Character deaths are handled poorly—nobody really reacts much
Length comparison: Rama packs a ton into 60k words; The Object does very little in 100k
Rama’s language, especially at the beginning, was almost poetic; I wanted to skim parts of The Object
Final recommendation: if you are starving for engineering with some hard sci-fi backing, might give it a look, otherwise, pass
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