Do You like book The Collapsium (2002)?
The first half was a bit of a merry go-round of a story. It seemed to go round in circles going nowhere.Problem occurs, help sought, problem fixed.The problem- the Collapsium, a highly dangerous project that will put a ring of crystals, composed of tiny black holes, around the sun that would increase the efficiency of transferring data and people.The Collapsium comes into danger of falling into the sun a handful of times, and seems to be fixed by ideas that come from the brain of one Bruno de Towaji.Sounds exciting, but it's not. He fixes it largely by staring into space, grumbling a bit, making a fool of himself at parties, and then coming up with a brilliant this'll fix it speech before disappearing off to his own little planet to work.That's the first half of the book, poss more.If you can get beyond that that's where things get good.The Collapsium's problems are not an accident at all, but and act of malicious intent, but who could possibly benefit from destroying the Queendom and everything in it?Well, those would be called spoilers.There are some intriguing little concepts in this book, such as the fax machine, that can make anything you want, from food to clothes, and as an added benefit it can transport you to other fax machines across the Queendom. Not only this but you can clone yourself and program those clones, or even save copies. Thus death has been eradicated.If I were judging this book on the first half I'd give it a two, maybe a three, cups of tea.Taking the second half into account I'd give it a 4, which is cemented in place by the list of terms and descriptions of how plausible each of the seemingly impossible sounding technologies actually are.There were a few interesting characters, and you get to see a hear LOT about the high society, but the everyday is only vaguely mentioned here and there. I wonder what a world of immortals would be like. Alas, you never find out.
—J.R. Barker
A lot of science fiction literature takes a somewhat negative view of scientific progress, 'cautionary tales' that point out the problems with scientific inquiry. I enjoy a lot of stories like that, but, when that type of story becomes too dominant within the genre, you end up with a very pessimistic view of things - I once heard an author refer to Michael Crichton's entire publishing history as "Here's a great scientific idea - AND HERE'S HOW IT WILL KILL US ALL."Fortunately, there are also books like The Collapsium, which take the view that the ultimate problem isn't science; if anything, it's people, who are going to be the ones to use science to evil ends. Fortunately for us, people are also the solution to all of our problems, because they're capable of incalculable acts of greatness and determination. Hanging between the two is the act of being human, the definition of which has been a driving force throughout all artistic endeavours since the dawn of humanity.This was my first exposure to McCarthy's writing style, and I fell in love with it right away. At first it seems kind of flat and workmanlike, but then he has these brilliant little moments of wonderfully crafted literature in the middle of it, like the stars themselves puncuating the vacuum of space. The more I get into it, though, the more I realized that it isn't flat at all, but that there's a lot more subtlty going throughout it. I found myself rereading several passages mid-paragraph to make sure I got all of the nuance within it.I enjoyed this book so much that I feel kind of bad that I only got it out of the library; I'll have to get a copy for my bookshelf some day.
—Ryan
