Subject: John Barnes: Mother of Storms

From: [email-masked] (Dani Zweig)
Date: 11 Jul 1994 19:48:50 GMT

I did not care for John Barnes's "Mother of Storms".  Oh, enough skill
went into it that I kept turning pages until the end, but it left a bad
taste.  It's a generic disaster novel awkwardly welded to a number of
half-digested science-fictional devices.

First and foremost, it's a disaster novel.  An ill-considered bombing
sets off a super-hurricane -- one big enough and well-enough-fed to keep
moving and building strength long past the point where normal hurricanes
die.  We get to watch as entire countries are scoured clean of life.  As
is almost required in such novels, we get to follow about a dozen
characters as they weave in and out of the story, to end up dying or
redeeming themselves (or both).  We get lots of exposition about how
hurricanes work (and how this one is different); we get violence; we get
sex; we get over a billion corpses. 

On the science fiction side, we get world-building, in vast and often
boring quantities.  Oh, the ideas are interesting, and often thoughtfully
worked out -- a world that's had an additional third of a century for
communication technology and the accompanying social changes to mature, a
technology for recording and broadcasting thoughts and emotions and
perceptions, some interesting von Neumann technologies and a space-flight
mechanism into which the author has obviously put a lot of time (and into
which the reader is going to put a lot of time, willy nilly), among things.
The world-building and the exposition, however, spend as much time getting
in the way of the story as they do being the story.  Barnes pays attention
to social impacts, but it's still too close to the bad old days of gimmick
science fiction.

The book also ends with a breakthrough analogous to Vinge's 'singularity'
('Singularity', by what is unlikely to be a coincidence, is also the title
of the last section of the book), except that Barnes tries to explain to
us (at length, naturally) what it's like, and except that there seems to
be an implicit assumption that only a couple of people will experience it,
and the rest of the human race will go on with business as usual.

Lots and lots of corpses, lots and lots of exposition, and a framework
upon which to hang it:  Save your money.  There are some clever ideas
here, and a moderately extensive look at the impacts of advanced
communications, and many readers may feel that they are worth the price of
admission, but they make for poor storytelling.

%A Barnes, John
%T Mother of Storms
%I Tor
%C New York
%D July 1994
%G ISBN 0-312-85560-5
%P 432 pp
%O hardcover, US$22.95

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

  Watership Down:  
  You've read the book.  You've seen the movie.  Now eat the stew!