Omphalos' SF Book Reviews

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1. Alan Holowaychuk (AToE) 06.29.10 / 3pm
   

   The first/last (and would have been only, if not for this reveiw) time I read this book I was actually very dissapoined in it. The reason for that was that I’d read a lot about Heinlein being one of the greats of SF, and well – this story goes nowhere. Nowhere at all, it is a practically plotless novel, and when I read it I thought that if all the rambling speaches explaining the author’s opinion on this that and everything were removed that it could have been boiled down to a short story, or even an introduction to a “proper” book.

   So I was interested to hear what Omphalos thought about it, and his take on Starship Troopers as a Utopia story really opened my eyes to what I’d missed. The reason there’s no real story in this story is because plot isn’t important to what R.H. was doing with this one. Omphalos gave me enough to chew on that instead of giving this to the used book store, I’ll be picking it up again soon.
2. Omphalos 06.29.10 / 9pm
   

   I think this book is a masterpiece. This is what I talk about when I say that a writer should be judged by how well he executes on his premise; how well he did what he set about doing. You can wind up with a book that irritates millions despite the fact that it fires on all eight cylinders (oh, did I just date myself? Do they even make eight cylinder engines anymore?)
3. Robspierre 07.08.10 / 8pm
   

   I’m a hardcore Heinlein fan and have all his works and I’ve come to believe that Utopian fiction was the primary focus of his writing. Even works such as double Star, which at first looks to be about an actor pretending to be a high profile politician, has utopian elements through out the work.

   Even Farnham’s Freehold was an attempt at satire of Utopian fiction through the lens of race.

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