Subject: FLARE by Thomas T. Thomas and Roger Zelazny

From: [email-masked] (Wayne Throop)
Date: 13 Oct 92 22:49:51 GMT

Thomas T. Thomas is turning into a pet peeve of mine.

His first novel was _The_Doomsday_Effect_, under the name of Thomas Wren
(which I suspect might have been a cheap trick on the part of Baen books
to try to sucker in fans of Timothy Zahn by placing the book in the
"right" place in Walnuts or Daldens, and imitating the cover style and
font in which Zahn's name occurred in current releases at that time). 
This book had the most wretched, mangled, obnoxiously BAD science
imaginable.  It was about a black hole, and it had just about every
error one could make about orbital dynamics, as well as treating the
bogosity "adding antimatter to a black hole will make it evaporate" as a
well-known scientific fact.  Ghak. 

Yet he won some "best new hard SF writer" award or other for this
piece of drivel.  Double Ghak.

At the time, I thought that (horrible as his first book was) he might
show some promise if he stayed away from the technical stuff and just
told some sort of adventure story with an SF background.  Since he
teamed up with Zelazny for this book, and since Zelazny has
traditionally stayed away from technical details, I thought 
I'd give it a try and see what's up. 

I now grok that this was a mistake.

I see none of Zelazny's touch at all, and suspect his name was simply
there to sucker folks such as myself into buying it.  And far from
staying away from the technical points, TTT revels in long, rambling
sections of purple prose about various technical details, complete with
his usual blunders.  Richard Geis praises it highly in a cover blurb,
paying particular attention to TTT's "special knowledge and insights". 
Where he found these is a mystery to me.  Quite the opposite. 

For some examples, TTT goes over in horrid detail how hydrogen fusion is
supposed to proceed in the sun, without ever mentioning the Bethe cycle
or anything else remotely like what is actually thought to occur.  He
measures "electrical potential" in watts.  And perhaps worst of all, one
of the central gimmicks of the book is a solar-sailer freighter which is
supposed to shuttle back and forth between earth and one of the gas
giants at 200 miles per second, using gravity slings at the endpoints. 
Trying a gravity-based course change around earth by kissing the
atmosphere at 200 miles per second would allow one to change course by
less than a tenth of a degree! Even if one were to attempt to make a 90
degree "turn" at a quarter million miles distance, it would take almost
50 g acceleration for a kilosecond or so.  To say nothing about how
loading and offloading of cargo was supposed to occur.  He mangles
computer terms, and has a program "dithering" when it should be
"antialiasing".  And then he manages to completely misunderstand and
mangle quantum chromodynamics in a little bit of completely irrelevant
fluff at the end of the book. 

The actual plot of the book is vanilla enough: after a long period
of solar inactivity (similar to the "Maunder minimum" of a while back),
folks have gotten used to being in space without sufficient protection
against sunspot and flare activity.  A mother-of-all-solar-flares
comes along and the subsequent disaster is followed through the
eyes of many diverse characters: in other words, a standard
disaster story, but based on a quite interesting idea.

But I found it totally unreadable.  Though of course, I have a certain
perverse attraction to such books, sticking it out to see just HOW bad
it can get (and in this case, the answer is "REALLY bad").   I often
wonder how it can be that bad, and consider the possibility that *I*'m
the one who has no touch with basic physics: perhaps I'm totally
mistaken about solar thermonucleonics, or maybe I'm just totally
misunderstanding how TTT intends for his freightcraft to make the turns
at the endpoints of its route, or maybe the color force and quarks don't
operate the way I remember.  But then I remember something so simple I
couldn't POSSIBLY have it wrong, like the "electrical potential" in
watts, and I say to myself "Nah! It really IS that bad!". 

And the greatest pity is that the fellow really seems to be an adequate
author if he'd just steer clear of technical subjects.  Instead, he
wallows in them to the exclusion of most else. 

Finally, one of the most peculiar things about this is that Niven, in
_Playgrounds_of_the_Mind_, says that it is an unforgivable sin for an
SF author to say "infrared" when "ultraviolet" is meant and other such
mistakes.  Yet TTT regularly makes far worse gaffes than that, and even
so I note on the bookshelves that Niven has one of TTT's stories in
_Man_Kzin_Wars_[N]_ (for some value of N). 

What's the world coming to?

You know, I feel much better now.  Thanks for listening, y'all.

%A   Roger Zelazny
%A   Thomas T. Thomas
%T   Flare
%I   Baen Books
%C   New York
%D   September 1992
%G   ISBN 0-671-72133-X
%P   344 pp.
--
Wayne Throop  ...!mcnc!dg-rtp!sheol!throopw