The Well of Stars [Hardcover]

This book is filled with creative ideas. And not just neat-sounding names tossed around, but well-thought, plausible, yet extraordinary things. The Great Ship and many of its components, for example, the mechanics of immortal human life, and the contents of the Dark Nebula. At its best, this book thrives on Big Things--it reminded me of the first half of Vernor Vinge's _Fire upon the Deep_ . I'm not sure the obvious comparison with Brin or Niven is warranted, though. because I had some problems with the book.

1) The characters all had depth, but never seemed to change during the course of the book. Maybe that was a deliberate choice when dealing with characters 1000's of years old--is there any change after your 10000th birthday? It's an interesting philosophical question, and a plausible answer, but unfortunately, it makes the book less satsifying. BTW, the earlier reviews are right about how strangely detached the characters are--their world and 10000-year existence are about to end and none of them seem particularly upset about it.

2) The ending is profoundly disappointing. Without spoiling it, let me just say that the ship goes into a Dark Nebula and faces a Threat. I expected something standard--the Threat is dangerous, almost does them all in, but somehow they beat it. Then the author adds in a second strand--maybe the good guys can convince the Threat not to kill them in a creative way (the book's dust jacket mentions this plot)--and I thought, sure, sounds good. The characters work hard at both of these strategies and book is going along well. But them, suddenly, we learn that actually neither of these are right--in the last 25-50 pages a new and badder Threat^2 suddenly appears, and a new Deus ex Machina appears and deals with the threat^2 without any intervention by the characters. The reader is left wondering "Huh? Why did I read the first 280 pages?" This leads to the next point...

3) My point #2 is somewhat overstated. There _are_ clues to point to the emergence of both Threat^2 and the Deus ex Machina. But the author's style is something like "Then, Mere suddenly understood the real threat. -cut jump to a totally different topic so the reader is left wondering "Huh? What did she understand?-" My PhD isn't in physics or psychology, but I don't think I'm much dumber than the average reader, and frankly, while the author may think he foreshadows events satisfactorily with this style, he doesn't.

The disappointing thing is that if he had just dropped both Threat^2 and the DeM, it would have been a really enjoyable book--my point about characters aside, the book is wonderfully imagined and (until the last 50 pages) the action moves along at an exciting pace. But the ending left me feeling so let down that it spoiled the experience for me. I might go to the library to read his other books, but not right away.

MARROW was an excellent stand-alone novel that left open the possibility of a sequel. WELL OF STARS is that sequel, but it is only the second chapter of what is now planned as a trilogy. It does not stand by itself anymore that The Empire Strikes Back does, and I think that accounts for a lot of the reader dissatisfaction with the book's ending. This should probably have been made clear on the book's dust jacket, but TOR has done this with other series books as well, downplaying or disguising the fact that they are merely installments.

Even taking into account the fact that Well of Stars is not supposed to clear everything up, I found it an unsatisfying read. Human (or alien or AI) characterization has never been Reed's strong point. What made Marrow a success were the worlds of Marrow and the Great Ship. It was sense-of-wonder sf with a vengeance.

That sense of wonder is lacking in this sequel. Readers do become somewhat more familiar with the Great Ship, but that cannot carry a novel for 300+ pages. Marrow itself is talked about, but the world is not actually on stage. The new world to be explored here is one external to the ship, a nebula called the Inkwell. The Inkwell and its inhabitants are somewhat intriguing, but not nearly to the extent that Marrow was in the prior book.

The Great Ship is headed into the Inkwell, and returning characters Pamir and Washen mount a scouting program to determine the true nature of the nebula. Other returning characters from Marrow include Washen's son Locke, whose interest is in unraveling the origin and purpose of the Great Ship and its cargo. This was to me the most interesting part of the whole novel, but Locke's conclusions occupy only a couple of pages total.

During the course of Marrow, some of Reed's better characters such as Diu, Miocene, and Till were lost. Characters new to Well of Stars are not nearly as compelling as the lost ones. The most important new character is a human with a strange (even by Great Ship standards) past named Mere. The character of Mere kind of undercuts that of Washen as her strength is what Washen's was in Marrow: sizing up new species. This is an important ability in Well of Stars, as the Inkwell is inhabited by an enigmatic collection of species.

Readers who like definitive endings would probably do best for themselves by waiting until book 3 comes out and reading Well of Stars and it together. Reed was four or five years between Marrow and Well of Stars, and if it takes another four or five years to get us to the story's end, I know I won't remember WOS then nearly as well as I remember Marrow four years after reading it. There's just not much about WOS that sticks with you, unlike with Marrow.

BTW, although I dislike book reviews that comment on other people's reviews instead of the book, I feel it is necessary to set the record straight regarding some very misleading and inaccurate statements made within one review. Readers of Marrow will recall that Mere was not the "hero" of the Marrow incident; in fact she did not appear in that book at all. The Inkwell is a nebula, not a black hole. Many other statements within the review in question are distortions of what is really going on; I don't want to get too specific because of the spoiler factor. Just don't let that very misleading review affect your decision as to whether to read this book or not; I do not believe its author actually read the book.

One of the primary characters in THE WELL OF STARS is "Mere," as you can read from the book's description above. But from what I understand, the book doesn't really tell us who Mere is, and how she came to be on the Great Ship. However, indie publisher Golden Gryphon Press has published a chapbook by Robert Reed that is actually the Mere origin story. It's titled (profoundly) MERE -- very cool story (Mere is actually an immortal being!), great cover art, and a nice collectable -- and is available from goldengryphon.com. Check it out.

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