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ChronoSpace
It's an intriguing concept and one that the author explores with relish. Indeed, one of the two main characters in the story spends a great deal of his time exploring the social climate of pre-World War II Germany during Hitler's rise to power. After the initial concept is explained, however, the story starts to break down.
The author seems infinitely more interested in name-dropping other, more successful sci-fi authors and scientists. Steele has done his research on obscure historical persona, but he can't seem to fix the holes in his own story.
A good example in terms of broken plot is the fictional scientific principle the author uses to drive his time-travel ships. It's called the 'Morris-Thorne' principle in the story, obviously named after the scientists who discovered it. Since this *is* a time-travel story, when a character named Morris is introduced, the observant reader would think that the author is stitching his story together, trying to subtly explain things to the reader. The observant reader would be wrong, because this angle is never touched again. In fact, the author rather absent-mindedly contradicts the possibility later in the story.
Another good example is the date scheme that Steele uses to identify his chapters. After the inevitable 'uhoh, we caused a paradox' event in the middle of the story, one of the dates listed mysteriously jumps from Monday, January 14th, 1998 to Thursday, January 15th, 1998. (The latter is correct. Monday was the 12th in 1998.) In any other kind of story, this kind of discrepancy could be easily dismissed as an editorial oversight. In a time-travel story, it's *supposed* to be a dead giveaway, just like the next date problem, when it jumps from a correct day in 1998 to an incorrect day in 1997. It's not any kind of giveaway. It's an editing mistake, and a painful one at that.
What's really amusing about this is that, earlier in the story, one of the characters makes the case for having to know the exact time and date in order to time-travel correctly. Apparently having the wrong date doesn't make much of a difference to their calculations when they use it to time-travel because it's never mentioned again. Neither are the other limitations on time-travel the author introduces, such as the inability of time-travellers to breach the first millennium or earlier.
The book is ridden with inconsistencies like this. I'm not sure if it's laziness or incompetence on the part of the author or if Mr. Steele was stuck with a rhesus monkey for an editor, but in a story where incidental details matter so much, these otherwise trivial errors are hard to forgive.
The climax of the book is a first-degree act of Deus Ex Machina, perpetrated by judgmental aliens who are super-intelligent and somehow immune to paradox. It's hard to swallow by the time you've already waded through the rest of the story's problems. The cautionary ending is bitter and disappointing. Steele successfully deviates from formula in this respect, but only at the cost of making his painfully static, flat characters seem even more depressive and uninteresting.
I have to conclude that 'ChronoSpace' is simply not worth the time it takes to read, even for the most adamant of sci-fi or time-travel fans. Even if you completely dismiss the amount of smugness the author shows dropping modern and historical names, the story is rife with inconsistencies, errors, and writing blunders. The characters are flat and uninteresting. Any chance they have to grow is brutally crushed by this steam-roller of a plot that Steele's trying to push. The one thing that could redeem a story like this was if it were inspiring or offered some new insight on the philosophy of time travel. Instead, Steele tries to be cautionary. It's hard to convincingly cautionary when the moral of your story is, "Don't mess with time travel, or easily angered super-aliens will destroy your planet's civilization." In fact, if Steele has anything to say about inspiration in ChronoSpace, it's that inspiration is dangerous. Even carefully controlled forward advancement is harmful and should be avoided. I'm not sure if that's what he was trying to accomplish, but it's a major theme in the book nonetheless.
The hell of all this is that even up against the super-cautionary tone of the book, Steele could have easily done a better job with his story, even if it was just a quick read-through of his own work to correct some of the screaming errors he's made. He didn't, and it shows.
Don't waste your time with 'ChronoSpace'.
You can purchase ChronoSpace from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
I am always interested in reading reviews about material I should read and hadn't heard about. I'm not so keen on spending time reading a review telling me that something I otherwise wouldn't have looked at anyway isn't worth the time and trouble. Just as the moderation guidelines suggest that it's better to raise the good than to punish the bad, I think that would have been a good idea here as well - give us a good review about something rather than spend the mindspace on this.
.02 worth...
Just my
Hey, where can I sign up to write reviews of other books that SlashDotters shouldn't buy?
I love the recent trend in book reviews. We either get "this sucks" or "this is a positive yet vague review and here's a link to purchase it." Woo-hoo!
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What with the flame called a book review, I would have thought the ObBN reference would say something like this:
... dept." byline though. Prepared me for a major book bashing, which is exactly what I got. (:
"You can purchase ChronoSpace from bn.com, but I don't know why you'd want to."
I did like the "From the
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
It would be best if UFO are from the future.
That means we make it.
That's what Miller was saying all along!
Speaking as a budding author, or maybe just a wannabe, I think that it is extremely important to plan your story in detail before you begin writing a novel length work. Research goes into the technology, the time, and pretty much everything else. This is why so many budding authors never make it past their first story.
If they do, they are frequently in the same boat as this guy--glaring inconsistencies. For me the biggest challenge is remembering what one has written about certain locales, which in a fantasy setting is devastating. In a real-earth fiction, it shouldn't be as hard--you go and visit the place you are describing.
Verbosity is no replacement for compentency.
Try it without the apostrophe next time, please.
Jack
..Monday, January 14th, 1998 to Thursday, January 15th, 1998. (The latter is correct. Monday was the 12th in 1998.)
Sheesh.. Better stay away from "Time Squad" on cartoonnetwork if you're going to analyse stuff that deeply.
I haven't read the book, so I can't comment on it, but the reviewer clearly didn't bother doing any fact checking. "The Morris-Thorne principle" is based on a paper by Michael Morris, Kip Thorne, and Ulvi Yurtsever which was published in the conservative and prestigious journal Physical Review Letters in 1988. For anyone interested in how this might relate to time travel, take a look at John Cramer's Alternate View column for June 1989.
There was a Herman comic strip -- oh, about 3 or 4 years ago -- where the characters are discussing UFOs. One of them says something like "I think they're time travellers from the future." When asked what they're doing, he answers "Buying up real estate."
Did I spell masochistic right?
Can I bum a sig?
creating an alternate universe in which the days of the week correspond to the dates in that matter...besides, the day of the week a given date falls on is not part of the unique identifier for that period of time.
MLA does not call for an apostrophe there, but some styles do:h tml
http://www.asu.edu/duas/wcenter/apostrophes.
OddManIn: A Game of guns and game theory.
Anyone else here see a dangerous trend of lazy submitters????
When I was reading it, I kept making the mistake of thinking... okay, this is a plot element. Surely this is going to resolve at the end. Right?
(No, I didn't know about the *real* Morris-Thorne research, but imagine including a character named 'Einstein' in a book about relativity and then *not* having that character be in some way responsible for the plot device.)
By the last fifty pages of the book, it was like watching a train wreck. I wanted to put it down, but I couldn't. I had some vague ray of hope that it would turn out well. Just like aforementioned trainwreck, there's always the hope that the train will right itself before it derails completely. In this case, the train didn't just derail, it slid off the tracks and rolled across the station.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Talk about a dose of humble pie...
My mom always said "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all."
I hate it when my mom is right.
www.christopherlewis.com
Does a good review, where the reviewer trashes a certain work, have a place in Slashdot? Certainly, if only so that you can avoid the book. Then again, a review is after all only the opinion of the reviewer, and you may find the book an interesting one even if he does not.
A good review will give you a fairly good indication whether you will like the reviewed work or not, regardless of what the reviewer thinks. I have read reviews of films where the reviewer goes all-out to show us his disgust for the movie, after which I immediately made up my mind about having to see it. Good reviews provoke some sort of emotion in the reader. A bad review makes a bland read, and it will not tell me whether or not to pick up the book even though the reviewer is trying to persuade me one way or the other.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
in Michael Crighton's "Sphere"
You didn't write scripts for ST:Voyager, by any chance?
RB
"looked like an interesting time-travel thriller-- something we've seen many of, but not a story that gets old due to its variations"
:-)
How can time-travel get old?
A VERY good book along a similar plot-line is Orson Scott Card's "Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus", in which future observers watch events in the past, and eventually come to the conclusion that their own miserable future all stemmed from the events of Columbus discovering America, and their subsequent attempt to go into the past and alter it for a better future.
It's a very good read.
Read Poul Anderson's books. Some are loosly knit together, some stand alone. All are worth a read. Actually, most Poul Anderson books are worth a read :-)
In my opinion, Scientology is a cult you should avoid.
We need to start forcing people to read Tolkien's essay, "On Faerie Stories", before writing.
Anyway, there's a reason that works like Lord of the Rings are so popular. When Aragorn shouts, "Elendil!", it has history behind it. There's an entire story behind that battle cry. It wasn't something that Tolkien just inserted at random because Aragorn should sound cool while swinging Narsil around.
Oh, by the way, I have the same problem of remembering what happened where. When you're neurotic enough to flesh out a few thousand years of history, it becomes rather easy to make minor (and major) mistakes.
I'd recommend, at the least, a series of binders, where you can index and easily modify various notes about your setting. Or, if you have inclinations of the technical nature, you can learn enough SQL and some sort of language to make a web interface, and do the same through that.
It's so wonderful to type in the name of a city, for example, and see everything that you've written about it. This sort of thing doesn't take that much work, either. Your readers shouldn't be browsing this database, so you can simply add notes instead of going into great detail.
Just enough so that you remember what you've written about a person, place, or thing.
As one of my friends told me last night, "The devil is in the details. And we all have to pay the devil his due."
Details! Verily!
Yeah - since the name Morris is just as recognized and culturally loaded as the name Einstein is. Maybe the name is Morris is so common that the situation that occured in the book is far more realistic that the one you hoped for?
XML causes global warming.
Maybe the name is Morris is so common that the situation that occured in the book is far more realistic that the one you hoped for?
Even if that's the case, it's baaaad writing...
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
That sounds more in line with sadism than masochism in my opinion.
I recognize the symptom - this is not unlike the way married people always try to fix others to get marred :)
Must be a slow day for nerd news or something. On the other hand it's nice to see an extremely negative review of a book -- most /. reviews are glowingly positive ones.
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
"Indeed, the story starts out revolving around the central premise that the small percentage of UFO's sighted that can't be explained away as airplanes, comets, or blimps, are in actuality time-travelling ships from the future sent to investigate the past."
Repo Man, 1984.
144l. ph34r my 133t l3g4l 5k1lz!
Wasn't there an episode of the original Star Trek where the Enterprise accidentally got sent back to the 1960s and was mistaken for an alien spaceship?
...I thought the name of the next game was supposed to be "Chrono Break"?
"I'm an old-fashioned type of guy. I worship the Sun and Moon as gods. And fear them."
The reviewer writes:
The author seems infinitely more interested in name-dropping other, more successful sci-fi authors and scientists. Steele has done his research on obscure historical persona, but he can't seem to fix the holes in his own story.
And then:
A good example in terms of broken plot is the fictional scientific principle the author uses to drive his time-travel ships. It's called the 'Morris-Thorne' principle in the story, obviously named after the scientists who discovered it.
So to me it seems that the reviewer is saying that Steele has named the fictional principle after the real scientists. Albeit leaving out Yurtsever, as the Morris-Thorne-Yurtsever Principle doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.
So which fact was missed?
Steve M
This link gives a highlevel but nice intro to timetravel and how it might be possible or not.
i me trav.htm
http://www.biols.susx.ac.uk/home/John_Gribbin/t
On another note, having doen CD reviews for many years now, I like to see negative reviews of this type - pointing out the actual problems, rather than just saying "this sucks". I think with the growing amount of media contesting for our attention out there, a negative review can help people decide NOT to read/buy/listen to something, therefore not wasting their time, and generating feedback to the work's creator.
Let's assume the book is truly as ill-plotted, badly written and poorly presented as the reviewer says. Then consider that the manuscript was still accepted by a publisher and further, made it into book form.
I reckon to those of us who have a half-decent plot idea but not the skill to build a storyscape around it could be in with a chance.
If it was truly that bad I'm sure some of the extremely short stories that I write then delete as rubbish from my hard disk would have made it past a publisher. In fact anything with a good plot idea and nothing else should suffice.
Now where did I leave that data recovery software?
Insert witty sig about inserting witty sig here, here.
I think Basil Exposition from the Austin Powers movies said it best when trying to explain time travel:
"I suggest you don't worry about this sort of thing and just enjoy yourself. That goes for you all, too."
You can purchase a worthwhile book at bn.com, but I'm not even going to bother looking the ISBN up for you. Slashdot welcomes reviews, but please try to review only good books so people will buy them through our sponser's links and we can get more keg-cash.
Thanksh.
Shincerely,
The sloshdot team
-Adam
I enjoyed it. I was surprised at how negative the review was... it is entertainment, not science. I didn't take it too seriously and I enjoyed the book.
Lately I've been reading some heinlein I missed when I went thru the obligatory hienlein phase in high school. Of course, some of what I'm reading was written in the 50s, and the science is just plain wrong. OK, fine. The science isn't that critical for a story-- and I'm someone who hates stories where the science is wrong. But you can't expect someone to predict science accurately 50 years into the future and then be unhappy when they are wrong. you have to suspend some disbelief.
IF you went into a time travel story without suspending disbelief, no wonder you were unhappy! By its nature, time travel stories are always going to be incorrect
Anyway, I'm not saying this is a golden book. The ending wasn't the greatest, but it was entertaining and thus, worth my time reading it.
Best book by steele (I think it was steele, it was a long time ago) is Kaleidascope Century. Really good book.
Chronospace is a good weekend read when you want to get away from reality for awhile.
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
Whew. That was a pretty harsh rip.
I will say this; I was disappointed with this book when I read it. I've read most of Steele's other work, and this was not one of his best. But it definitely wasn't quite that bad. It had some interesting premises in it: and it didn't quite come through.
Having said that, I will say that this book is not reminiscent of his best work, by far. When he's off, he's off -- but when he's on, he's stellar.
If you're looking for his best work, check out Steele's short story work, Sex and Violence in Zero G, Rude Astronauts and All-American Alien Boy. The short stories in those books by far outstrip this book, and build an amazingly neat background for his "Near Space" series. Orbital Decay and Lunar Descent are great; I personally like The Jericho Iteration, because he writes about some of my old stomping grounds in St. Louis.
Also, check out the short story he was just put up for: Stealing Alabama. Very neat premise.
Whatever you do... don't read this.
Are our future spawn coming back in time as violent homosexuals or is the behavior a side effect of time travel? That is the only explanation that I can think of for all of the cattle mutilations and the endless anal probing.
I mean who is going to tell Cartman that wasn't an alien probe, but rather was a manmade one, stickin' outta his ass. This could be the last straw for him. The one to push him over the edge.
But perhaps we should give our descendents a break. After all we don't know what sort of pressures they might be under. Perhaps their orgasmatrons have all broken and they are pissed about that. Perhaps they are all sterile after the great war and need our sperm and ovum to propagate the species and are using the anal probing as a distraction during the procedure.
Hell, perhaps the cows are super intelligent due to excessive hormonal treatment and are exacting their revenge upon the homo-sapiens that feasted upon them for so many years. That would explain the mutilations to some extent if they were harvesting ovum and sperm due to species infertility. Also, isn't is some poor unsuspecting cow farmer in the middle of nowhere that usually recieves the anal probe? Thought so.
It is a smarter person than me that knows the answer.
Mod me down for being a twit.
"Giving money and power to governments is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." - P.J. O'Rourke
Slashdot may be CmdrTaco's own little playhouse, but if it's gonna run reviews, interviews, news, and the occassional feature, it's engaging in the practice of journalism.
,journalism. Sloppy, biased, unbalanced and amateur-hour journalism, but still journalism.
Pretending that it's just a big talkfest for geeks is a copout. That doesn't absolve the "staff" from their responsibility to be accurate and professional. Nor do claims in the FAQ that Slashdot doesn't verify or check anything -- leaving that to the (anonymous or disguised) readership -- can't negate the fact that much of what's going on here is, in fact
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Now that I've thought about it, I guess I have read horribly written books all the way to the end while thinking this has to get better at some point or he'll/she'll salvage the plot in the end. I guess we're the suckers then.
Can I bum a sig?
Let's just pass over the comment that this particular idea hasn't been used to death and introduce you to the movie Millenium in which Humans from the future travel back in time and harvest people who history records as having died in airline crashes into the future... It bares a passing resemblance to Freejack starring Emilo and our ever lovable Sting. No UFOs in the latter movie, however. No, this idea hasn't been trodden, beat, raped and otherwise set aflame now, has it?
You need a FREE iPod Nano
..."The Tranquility Alternative", a wonderful novel and part of an interesting Alternate History where Robert H. Goddard developed a suborbital interceptor in 1944 and Neil Armstrong lands on Mars on July 20, 1976 to scatter his ashes there at Utopia Planitia.