Subject: McCollum: Sails of Tau Ceti

From: [email-masked] (Dani Zweig)
Date: Sat, 05 Sep 92 23:52:36 GMT

I've enjoyed most of Mike McCollum's books, but the last one --
Clouds of Saturn -- was weak, and the latest one -- Sails of Tau Ceti --
is even weaker.

It's the twenty-third century, and a huge sub-light alien ship
is arriving with the survivors of the (unexpected) Tau Ceti nova.
The aliens ask for asylum on Earth, and persuade one of the crew
members of the ship which first meets them to serve as their
advocate.  They persuade her to take the job by letting her in on
their deep dark secret.

But the book is a house of cards.  While one of the plot devices 
requires that the date be two and a half centuries in our future,
half a century would be more convincing in most respects.  Worse,
there is no convincing reason for the aliens to have taken on the
advocate they did, except to provide the author with a viewpoint
character, there is no convincing reason for her to keep their secret,
and it is implausible that the aliens would understand humans so
well except for they key blind spots.

The characterization is very shallow -- even that of the character
whose viewpoint we follow for 98% of the story -- precisely because
what the characters depends not on their characterization, but only
upon the whims of the author.  This book appears decades too late:
It's gadget fiction, except that the gadgets don't occupy much of the
book; it's puzzle fiction, except that it's inconceivable that the
key portions of the puzzle wouldn't have occurred to the analysts on
both sides; it's science fiction, except that neither the science nor
the fiction is very interesting.

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

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