
Master Critic
Posts: 550
Joined: December 31, 1969, 08:00:00 PM
Location: Atlanta, GA
The Garden of Eden by Martin Westlake
For a start, we couldn't access him completely and we didn't know whether this was in his basic design or whether he was somehow deliberately able to block us out. Before the voyage, back in China, we had repeatedly tried to converse with him, but his mind was somehow able to throw up a wall of static which we couldn't penetrate.
Another example is when he mentions radiation levels and the forbidden capitals. We have in our mind a dying world. It’s not pertinent to the story what exactly happened, but get enough to understand the reason they’re in space.
However, any technique taken too far can be bad, and that happens here. There’s a fine line between giving too much information and not enough. In the former, you bore your reader. In the latter, you have them thinking too much.
I needed more backstory for Goli in order to empathize with him. His death would have touched me more if I understood him better. Here’s a case where less is not more.
Another instance is the following:
Worse still, 'pathy couldn't work in a vacuum, so we had to switch to old-fashioned radio connections. We couldn't even have a proper conversation.
I thought, “Well, why wouldn’t telepathy work? Does it have a physical component instead of being pure energy? Is it like a sound wave, something our brains can attune to as it propagates through a physical medium? That’s an interesting concept. I’m not sure how electrical signals can somehow become sound waves, but...”
And then I realized I wasn’t reading the story anymore. If you’re genre is science fiction, you’d better be careful about skimping on the science. Your audience should like science, so gaps like that will distract them.
Finally, the biblical allusions were interesting, if a bit of an olio. I think the author could have done a better job of tying it to a specific theme instead of just alluding to various names from the Bible (e.g., Noah, Ark, Davi, Goli, Eden).
- Samani
jaimie l. elliott
[b:2o4dvkjg]Check out my website:[/b:2o4dvkjg]
http://www.jaimie.org/