Post by sturgeon on Jul 4, 2022 20:37:20 GMT
This cap harks back to late-Golden Age sci-fi. To begin with, Fred Hoyle's The Black Cloud was brought to mind, except the cloud in this story is not sentient. This Ganymede cloud is a deadly poison emanating from an impacted meteorite; but also, ironically, a cloud swimming with primordial life. The way the cap builds up tension while focussing on the conflicts within the rescue crew has echoes of Event Horizon or Solaris. Ultimately, the rescue crew sacrifice themselves to save the day.
You can tell from my lofty comparators that this was right up my street. But two problems weigh down this otherwise pleasing piece. Maybe two and a half problems.
1. The rescue crew's leader was an unlikeable creep. The cap might have been hearkening back to 1950s sci-fi, but it didn't need to bring the uncomfortable sexism with it. I wasn't rooting for him - worse than that, he annoyed me so much it flat-out stopped me from enjoying the ride.
2. The descriptions of the scenery and the way the pyrene bubbles interact with it is hard to follow in some places. At one point the VC describes "a tunnel looking for all the world like a gigantic glass cigar tube containing a trio of clambering ants" - and that I could visualise - but it's pretty much the only earthbound simile in the whole cap; the rest of the descriptions are too literal to help me visualise what I'm seeing. (Also, in that sentence I just quoted, you could delete the tautological "looking for all the world".)
And-a-half. There are a couple of threads that kind of go nowhere, like the religious colony that were probably all dead but maybe not. And like the ending - the last line is a mystery, what was he going to say? (And why would putting his helmet against hers help his voice to carry?)
My favourite line was, "Palomar knew the type: Administrative to a fault, the smile tightened and loosened by opposing screws on the sphincter."
My least favourite line was, "outside it's pushing minus 275." That's bound to annoy any sci-fi fan who knows the value of absolute zero, it's like your main scientist character saying with a straight face "the value of pi is pushing 4."
My vote is no.
You can tell from my lofty comparators that this was right up my street. But two problems weigh down this otherwise pleasing piece. Maybe two and a half problems.
1. The rescue crew's leader was an unlikeable creep. The cap might have been hearkening back to 1950s sci-fi, but it didn't need to bring the uncomfortable sexism with it. I wasn't rooting for him - worse than that, he annoyed me so much it flat-out stopped me from enjoying the ride.
2. The descriptions of the scenery and the way the pyrene bubbles interact with it is hard to follow in some places. At one point the VC describes "a tunnel looking for all the world like a gigantic glass cigar tube containing a trio of clambering ants" - and that I could visualise - but it's pretty much the only earthbound simile in the whole cap; the rest of the descriptions are too literal to help me visualise what I'm seeing. (Also, in that sentence I just quoted, you could delete the tautological "looking for all the world".)
And-a-half. There are a couple of threads that kind of go nowhere, like the religious colony that were probably all dead but maybe not. And like the ending - the last line is a mystery, what was he going to say? (And why would putting his helmet against hers help his voice to carry?)
My favourite line was, "Palomar knew the type: Administrative to a fault, the smile tightened and loosened by opposing screws on the sphincter."
My least favourite line was, "outside it's pushing minus 275." That's bound to annoy any sci-fi fan who knows the value of absolute zero, it's like your main scientist character saying with a straight face "the value of pi is pushing 4."
My vote is no.