Subject: Allen: The Shattered Sphere

From: [email-masked] (Dani Zweig)
Date: Thu, 10 Nov 1994 05:22:58 GMT

"The Shattered Sphere" is the second book in Roger MacBride Allen's "The
Hunted Earth" series -- a somewhat lackluster sequel to his excellent
"The Ring of Charon".

In "The Ring of Charon", the Earth is...abducted.  By mistake.  There is a
life form that farms solar systems, and one of its...constructs...mistakenly
takes a human gravity-wave experiment as a signal to harvest our solar system.
(This life form is one of the ideas central to the book, and doesn't lend
itself to capsule description.  It has aspects of a Von Neumann machine, a
berserker, a cyborg, a Dyson sphere, a hive, and a pack, if that helps.)
That book ends with Earth in a very strange stellar system centered on a
Dyson sphere, the humans who were off Earth at the time trying to pick up
the remaining pieces in a badly damaged solar system, and the wormhole
connecting the two closed. 

Oh, it also ends with indications that there's something out there that
eats Dyson spheres for lunch.  In "The Shattered Sphere", that something
comes a-snacking.  This book consists mostly of the humans on both sides
of the wormhole learning about the kidnappers, which makes for a great
deal of exposition, however disguised.  That's not automatically a bad
thing:  "The Ring of Charon" was just as exposition-heavy, and the most
interesting part of the second book is the exposition (disguised as a
process of discovery and intuition) on the development of the Dyson system.

It works if there are enough interesting concepts upon which to expound,
and if it is tied in to an interesting enough human story.  Most of the
concepts we encounter in "The Shattered Sphere", however, are elaborations
of those introduced in the first book.  There just isn't enough new meat
to hang on the thin plot skeleton.  (It would have been interesting to see
more done  with the sphere-eater.  Allen uses "strange matter" here the
way some books used "radium" earlier in the century -- as one part
explanation and nine parts incantation.)

The book ends with the immediate dangers being warded off by virtue of the
humans having thought of ways to use their kidnappers' technology that
didn't occur to their kidnappers -- a somewhat wooden plot device in
itself -- and by virtue of just the right tools not only being at hand,
but also being incredibly easy for outsiders to use. 

"The Hunted Earth" may be best classified as a disaster story:  Something
big happens (hurricane, earthquake, plague, nova, whatever) and we spend
several hundred pages getting lectured to about that disaster and watching
a cast of characters cope with it.  Since it's also "idea sf" -- science
fiction whose most interesting aspect is the clever concept rather than
the plot or the character -- the coping mostly takes the form of solving
the problem, rather than of rioting or plotting or dying horribly.  It's a
familiar formula because it works.  In "The Ring of Charon" it worked very
well.  If "The Shattered Sphere" is any indication, however, its not a
a formula that can support too long a series.  At least, not unless the
sequels introduce enough new and interesting material, rather than expanding
and expounding upon earlier material.

%A Allen, Roger MacBride
%T The Shattered Sphere
%I Tor
%C New York
%D July 1994
%G ISBN 0-312-85734-9
%P 412pp
%O $22.95
%S The Hunted Earth

-----
Dani Zweig
[email-masked]

   'T is with our judgements as our watches, none
   Go alike, yet each believes his own
		--Alexander Pope