[.ca] Cradle: A Novel (ISBN 0446356018)

Oddly Disappointing:
Years ago I eagerly purchased a copy of CRADLE by Arthur C. Clark and Gentry Lee. I had really enjoyed the books Clarke wrote just before CRADLE. I also enjoyed the books written later. But somehow I didn't get around to reading CRADLE until now. I must say that I was disappointed. I had been expecting Clarke's style as I had read in such books as THE HAMMER OF GOD and GHOST FROM THE GRAND BANKS. But the Clarke-Gentry mix just didn't do it for me. The book could be easily described as RAMA doing the work of the Overlords from CHILDHOOD'S END. An unmanned probe comes to Earth to elevate the human species and restore a number of others. This plan is stumbled across by a reporter looking into the alleged disappearance of a secret Navy missile. The probe is making a journey to a dozen planet. At each planet it will assemble life forms based on specimens collected on an earlier visit. In CRADLE, a couple of humans get a chance to tell the aliens that we don't want humans to be elevated. That's pretty much it. I had a hard time getting through this book. I normally fly through Clarke's books but this one was just bogged down in unnecessary details. This book also contained a large number of sexual scenes that I have to assume were the work of Lee as I have not encountered their like in Clarke's work. I really cannot recommend this book to anyone, so if you haven't read it and were considering it I have to give you fair warning.

Not up to the usual standard:
I hate saying unpleasant things about other people's work because I'd hate it if they did it to me, but on this occasion I have to make an exception. Cradle has to be the worst book I've read in ages. The problem lies not in description or character interest but in plot and setting. The whole alien business which is supposedly the subject of the book gets pushed to one side by long soap-opera stories about the pasts of the characters, some of whom actually do virtually nothing to affect the main story (e.g. the naval commander, who turns up at the end after taking little or no active role up till then and suddenly gets made to feel good about himself again).Between them, the human characters must have just about every emotional problem known to man! Also, nearly everything to do with the alien ship is obvious to the reader but not to the characters by about halfway throughthanks to the chapters about the aliens, and the one major thing not revealed gets sorted out no problem by the characters after a quick bit of soul-searching. Actually, I have just realised that the whole story resembles nothing more than one of the duller episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Finally, an interesting plotline - the message to the aliens from "Power #2" - is not developed at all. The setting of the novel in the very near future also denies Clarke the chance to use one of his greatest skills - the projection of humankind's future development. This is usually the best aspect of his books and is totally lacking here. Clarke and Lee can do considerably better than this. I have read another of their collaborations, Rama II, which also puts a strong emphasis on character description, but not nearly so much at the expense of plot. If you want to read some good revelatory Clarke material, I would recommend Childhood's End, which is a really ingenious work. Cradle, I am afraid, falls well below his usual standards.

Must be early Gentry Lee:
I had a very hard time with this book. I was quite confused, as I had read the whole Rama series as they came out. While perusing lists for something to read, I came across Cradle. The beginning vignette about the "zoo craft" was, IMHO, written moderately well, but as soon as Carol comes on the scene, it gets very, well, amatuerish. I even went back and reviewed the Rama books, thinking that maybe I had read them so long ago that maybe they \owere bad\c then, but no, alas, they were (mostly) well constructed plots, with characters with whom I could relate, and relatively few confusing sections. Rama (original) did seem quite different from the others, but that made sense, since Clarke did the original in 1979 (or so, I think), and Lee came on with Rama II. The opening vignette in Cradle seemed as if it were written by a totally different author, then shipped across the sea to another author who finished the rest of the book. Then, it dawned on me, Cradle was either a) Written by an amateur author (Gentry Lee), with very little involvement with Clarke, or b) written by an entirely different author than the Rama series, again with little Clarke influence. The constant switching "mindpoints" (where in one paragraph you hear what Carol is thinking, then the very next sentence you hear what Nick is thinking) is a typical early "learning writer" syndrome. There is a lot of "telling" instead of "showing". The plot points are haphazardly structured throughout, with interesting tidbits thrown in here and there without an uberpurpose. I felt throughout the whole novel that it might not go anywhere, and sho-nuff, it really didn't. In the Rama II and beyond series, these problems are significantly improved, and show levels of improvement over the evolution of the series. My hypothesis supported conclusion "A" above. I thought it might just be me, and I was too critical (since I am learning about crafting novels and writing, and checking how well-written novels are crafted), so I looked on Amazon to see what others had said. A majority didn't rate this book well either, for reasons I primarily agree with. I then looked at when the books came out, and realized that Cradle came out in 1989, Rama II in 1990, Garden in 1992, and Revealed in 1995. So, my conclusion is that this is the work of an early, learning writer. I gave it a mercy 2 stars, not 1, because it is an early work, and (presumably) Lee has improved significantly, but I've certainly read better.

Interesting ideas but cookie-cutter characters:
There is a piece Star Trek lore that states a race of beings called the Preservers went through the galaxy picking up semi-intellegent life and planting them around the galaxy to protect them from extinction/war/meteors. Spielberg's ET is essentially this same idea, and it's the idea behind this novel, Cradle. In fact, these same authors explore the same territory to better effect in their Rama series. So why read this book? Frankly, it is inferior to the Rama series. The plot mostly focusses on a reporter trying to find a test missile she suspects was lost on a test flight. The navy, naturally, wants to prevent word of this leaking out, so are also searching for the missile. One of the absurdities of the book is that the reporter finds the missile site so easily when the navy has been looking for weeks (?) with more resources and information. There are similar absurdities throughout the book. In addition, the characters are laughably 2-dimensional, all defined by some life-altering mental or physical trauma that took place years before. Thirdly and most annoyingly, great detail is taken to explain the details of alien manufacture without telling the reader what they are assembling, so the reader must wade through 4 pages of alien automatons attaching sticks together to discover that they are building an antenna. It's really trying on the reader's patience! And yet I couldn't help but enjoy the book. The pacing is quick, the writing is usually loose and flowing (with the exception noted above), and it's an easy read. It's not nearly as good as the Rama series, but more enjoyable than much of what's out there in science fiction.

Definitely not the best work from this pair:
This novel is definitely not the best work out of the collaboritive efforts of Gentry Lee and Arthur Clarke, but it's still a pretty good novel. The story is almost a mystery with some aspects of military intrigue thrown in for good measure, and as you would always expect aliens. The story is about a group of zoo-keeping aliens that crashland a ship filled with animals they are trying to return to their native habitat. I actually found the aliens story more interesting than the story being told from the perspective of the humans on earth. However we are only given small snippets of what the aliens are doing every now and then. I think a full length novel could be written about these zoo-keeping aliens that Clarke begins to describe but never fully finishes talking about. I think Clarke has done one of his best efforts yet at polishing his characters and making you truly feel a connection with them. From the general who moonlights as an actor, to the female journalist who is searching for a person to connect with, to the software guy who is afraid his girlfriend is showing him up. That being said, the characters still feel somewhat one-sided and the story as a whole seems to be extremely rough and unfinished. There are several plot elements that get introduced and somewhat resolved but never get tied in to the main plot. The only rationale I can concieve of for this is that they are meant to be viewed as a parallel story to one of the vignettes about the alien ocean animals that try to mate across a large barrier. Many of the stories in this novel could be viewed as explanations of how humans often try to do the same thing and fail. However that seems to be stretching the intent fairly thin. Overall this is still an okay story in its own right and the vignettes are interesting even if they never lead us anywhere.