Originally posted by: @RUTGERS.ARPA:DA61@CMU-CS-A.ARPA
Message-ID: <913@topaz.ARPA>
Date: Fri, 8-Mar-85 14:40:01 EST
Article-I.D.: topaz.913
Posted: Fri Mar 8 14:40:01 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 9-Mar-85 08:44:58 EST
Sender: daemon@topaz.ARPA
Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.
Lines: 24
From: Dave Ackley
A couple of recent messages have described Brunner's latest
novel, The Crucible of Time, as unfinishable. I did finish it.
It is a book easier to appreciate than to love. Brunner set
himself a difficult task for the book: No humans ever appear.
No humanoid aliens, no genetically altered human stock, no
first-contact with space-faring humans, nothing.
It is certainly possible to fulfill this constraint in a
more-or-less trivial way, by taking any story one likes and
replacing "Earth" with "Grotz", "marriage" with "conflockage",
and so on. Brunner wanted more \alien/ aliens than that.
But if there are no human-like characters, the aliens can't be
\too/ alien. Imagine Lem's Solaris without a human presence.
If the alien mind is unfathomable, and there are no humans,
there is no story.
Parts of The Crucible of Time were slow, but I quite appreciated
the line that Brunner walked between syntactically alien humans
and semantically incomprehensible aliens. Borrow the book and
give it a try.
-Dave Ackley (Ackley@CMU-CS-A)