Bigfoot? Really? That's a Little Disappointing
The cynical review:So, the big comet heading for Earth that must be blown up with a nuclear device to prevent an extinction level event for all humanity . . . turns out to be AN ALIEN SPACESHIP! Wow, didn't see that one coming. Yawn. And then a funny, intelligent probe from a distant machine civilization comes to check things out but gets chased off by trigger happy military-industrial-Dick- Cheney-how-I-learned-to- stop-worrying-and-love- the-bomb types. And then the super-genius British rocket scientist who gets all the ladies has to supernaturally channel the probe from the distant world that wants to destroy humanity so he can mourn the loss of his woman who succumbed to environmental-damage-induced autoimmune disease and hook up with the Japanese astronaut chick and figure out that the aliens were really here half a million years ago to mess with the genes of . . . BIGFOOT -- YES, BIGFOOT -- to accelerate the evolution of a fellow biological race to fight the machines. So this book is pretty much Armageddon meets Deep Impact meets The Matrix meets Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow meets Bigfoot, with an old Asian guy from Karate Kid thrown in for . . . some reason I wasn't too sure of. So pretty boring overall.
Less cynical, more honest review:
The wasn't a great sci-fi novel, but it was interesting to read as a period piece, published as it was in the early 1970s. An awful lot of bad-to-decent movies have been made out of some of the ideas thrown around in this story. I'm sure some of these ideas weren't original to this novel, but they would have had a lot less currency when Benford was writing, so you have to give credit to him for that. The use of Bigfoot -- YES, BIGFOOT -- as a plot device was unfortunate, but it was the 1970s after all, when my grade school library had books about Bigfoot. I know, because I checked them out. And read them. And believed in Bigfoot. Which is why it was disappointing when I learned sometime within the last couple of years that Bigfoot was a total fake, even that film of the large, hairy creature walking away from the camera (a film that is mentioned in this novel, by the way).
Benford has continued writing in the thirty-odd years since and I think has some pretty good stuff out there; I'm just starting to look into his work. I'll let you know if he got better.
Under the Mountain Sci-Fi Club Rating: ** (out of five)
posted by Under The Mountain | 9:10 PM
4 Comments:
You really believed in Bigfoot? This changes everything.........
If you had seen that film, you would have believed, too!
Besides, I went to my school library and that's what they gave me to read. "At least he's reading a book!" they must have said. I wonder if it is really better after all to know things that are no so than it is not to know things at all.
Have you ever read "Rendezvous with Rama" by Arthur C. Clarke? Some similarity (object coming toward earth - seemingly an asteroid/comet turns out to be some kind of ark from another galaxy but is it malevolent? They consider a nuke & all that. Pretty good read - you can borrow my copy. I've been reading his short stories lately & they're pretty cool.
No, I need to read some Clarke. I know he wrote for about fifty years and is a real sci fi master, but I haven't found the right place to dive in yet. I've spent most of my sci fi time with Isaac Asimov, David Brin and a few others. "Rama" sounds like a good place to start.
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