Chris reviewed Breaking Strain (Arthur C. Clarke's Venus Prime, Book 1) by Paul Preuss (Venus Prime)
The Unpleasantness aboard the Star Queen
3 stars
A few years ago there were a number of novels developed from stories by top-name authors such as Isaac Asimov, Robert Silverberg, and Arthur C. Clarke. The present volume, Arthur C Clarke’s Venus Prime: Volume 1: Breaking Strain, originally appeared in 1987. IBooks have reprinted it, which is possibly good news for the charitable foundations Clarke set up and which he hoped to fund by embarking on collaborative ventures (according to Peter Nicholls in the "Encyclopedia of Science Fiction").
Is it good news for anyone else though? In trying to connect Science Fiction and the Crime novel, Paul Preuss, who is capable of good writing at times but very often leaves the reader thinking, "could do better", has really provided a chapter of a much longer work. The novel can be divided into three parts: the first is the reawakening of the enhanced human Sparta and her entry into the …
A few years ago there were a number of novels developed from stories by top-name authors such as Isaac Asimov, Robert Silverberg, and Arthur C. Clarke. The present volume, Arthur C Clarke’s Venus Prime: Volume 1: Breaking Strain, originally appeared in 1987. IBooks have reprinted it, which is possibly good news for the charitable foundations Clarke set up and which he hoped to fund by embarking on collaborative ventures (according to Peter Nicholls in the "Encyclopedia of Science Fiction").
Is it good news for anyone else though? In trying to connect Science Fiction and the Crime novel, Paul Preuss, who is capable of good writing at times but very often leaves the reader thinking, "could do better", has really provided a chapter of a much longer work. The novel can be divided into three parts: the first is the reawakening of the enhanced human Sparta and her entry into the world. The second is the unpleasantness aboard the "Star Queen", a vessel which unavoidably bears a strong resemblance to the Jupiter probe in "2001". This section is called "Breaking Strain" and is where Clarke’s original story comes in, though the "Breaking Strain" part of the book’s title no longer appears on the cover. The third part brings the two together as Sparta investigates what happened aboard the "Star Queen".
The back-story to the novel sequence is Sparta trying to discover her true identity (which places us firmly in Quest Fantasy space), but over six novels the interest may be strained rather than sustained. Because of the origin in a shorter piece, the pace is a bit uneven; Preuss does not rein in a tendency to over-elaborate, presumably to build the work up to proper novel length. Does the reader need all the technical details, or the gruesome detail of Sparta’s awakening? But then again and again, the intended readership is probably late-teenage and predominantly male, perhaps the technical details matter, and so do the diagrams ("Infopak" by Darrel Anderson) at the back of the book, and they’ll sell it to a readership starved of proper SF.
