Reviews and Comments

Started on this ages ago, completely forgot it because of some other release I wanted to read first, picked it up again recently. Only a few chapters in, but the book has already persuaded me that anybody advocating for colonies on Mars within the forseeable future are delusional idiots with no regard for human life.

Good grief this felt even more dated than the Stoker tripe I read recently. And it's not written very well either. For the next Norton read I'll just skip ahead a few decades and hope the writing improves.

As others have pointed out - this novel must have been wild to read when it first came out. Today the concept of the vampire is so well known, that even if you have never consumed any vampire specific media, you still will be very aware of Dracula just by cultural osmosis. The first few chapters would have hit completely different if you had never heard about Transylvania.

Oppfølger til Chrictons "The Andromeda Strain", skrevet og satt 50 år etter den første. Wilson gjør et godt forsøk på å etterligne Chricton, men skillet mellom pastisj og parodi er syltynt, og ofte glir det over i det komiske.

Ah, jeg er en sucker for slike "Crichton-lite" bøker - når jeg ser første kapittel heter "Stage 0: Exposure" så er jeg solgt med en gang.

It was a slog to get through this, and in the end it was a complete waste of time with no payout. An interesting idea with some potential, butchered by extremely poor writing and presumably no editing. The syphilis must have affected Stoker's brain by this point, because it is hard to fathom how this could be the product of a famed novelist.

To quote HP Lovecraft: "The Lair of the White Worm, dealing with a gigantic primitive entity that lurks in a vault beneath an ancient castle, utterly ruins a magnificent idea by a development almost infantile."

One thing Lovecraft fails to mention is the over the top - almost to the point of satire - racism in the novel, but then again he might have approved.