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3.0 out of 5 stars
Catching up with Barlowe, Dec 25 2003
Having just purchased a new copy of the classic BARLOWE'S GUIDE TO EXTRATERRESTRIALS, I felt it necessary to catch up on some of the incomparable Wayne D. Barlowe's more recent work. I leafed through several books and settled on EXPEDITION, primarily for my interest in its subject matter (having many graduate hours of zoology under my belt). I see that from the late '80s-onward, Barlowe has been handling both art and writing chores, I assume in order to make his projects more personal and satisfying. Certainly, the man is an immensely talented artist, but I feel that he should have worked with established authors and/or scientists in order to give EXPEDITION more substance, structure, and technical basis.Regarding the story, I feel that Barlowe blew it from the start with the premise that the expedition to the planet Darwin IV was only possible due to the fact that Earth had already made contact with a sort of "sponsor" alien species, the Yma. If that's the case, then why aren't we learning more about the Yma instead of the inhabitants of Darwin IV? Detailing Earth's first contact with another intelligent life-form sounds more interesting to me than the study of an unknown planet. A tighter approach would have been to drop the Yma and then have all of the technology be Earth-based (this IS the 24th century, after all). I definitely feel that when you're theorizing on alien biology, all rules, such as we know them, can stand by the wayside. For a detailed project such as EXPEDITION, however, there should be some logical restraint. While this book contains some very clever biological concepts, such as the Amoebic Sea, Emperor Sea-Strider, Rime-Runner, and Gyrosprinter, they are brought down a notch by the questionable equilibrium of the Daggerwrist population, the feeding and locomotion of the Tundra Plow, and the seemingly inefficient maturation of the Forest Slider. But of course, we've found some organisms on our own planet that are almost as odd, so who's to say what we may find on another?
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